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An Egyptian general is blaming Hamas and outsiders for funding 'global' jihadi groups in the Sinai Peninsula, including those that carried out Sunday's terror attack against an Egyptian army base, reported Arabic press agency al-Sharq al-Awsat. Terrorists ambushed and killed 16 Egyptian soldiers, then tried to drive hijacked military vehicles into Israel to continue the attack. Israeli military forces intercepted them, killing several terrorists. General Gamal Mazloum's comments, picked up by the Times of Israel, squarely contradict attempts by Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to blame Israel for the attack. They also demonstrate an Egyptian awareness of Hamas' long-term...

Israelis urged to return home for fear that peninsula will become launching pad for terror attacks as police abandon posts, facing increasing violence. Concern is mounting in Israel over reports that the Egyptian police force has abandoned the Sinai Peninsula in face of growing Beduin violence, and that the territory will turn into a breeding ground for global jihad. According to information that has arrived in Israel, Egyptian police authorities have abandoned dozens of police stations throughout the peninsula after they were attacked by Beduin armed with missiles and assault rifles. This concern was behind Israel’s decision two weeks ago...

Israeli officials are nervously watching events in Egypt's sparsely populated Sinai Peninsula, worried that a power vacuum in Cairo and the withdrawal of police forces will embolden the Bedouin tribes who help smuggle weapons to Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. In a sign of the rising tensions, Bedouin in the northern Sinai on Friday used rocket-propelled grenades to attack the headquarters of Egypt's state security in El Arish, a town close to Egypt's border crossing into Gaza, according to witnesses. Israel's fear is that with Egypt's police having all but disappeared from the peninsula—after police were asked to step...

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt plans to build a $1 billion tunnel under the Suez Canal at Port Said and will begin seeking finance as soon as the designs are completed, Al-Akhbar newspaper on Monday quoted the investment minister as saying. The tunnel, to be built 19 km (12 miles) south of the Canal's northern entrance, will have 3 passageways, one for rail and two for cars, the newspaper quoted Mahmoud Mohieldin as telling a conference in Dahab in the eastern Sinai Peninsula. The conference was called to discuss investment in the cities along the canal and in the Sinai, which...

Egypt Attacks May Indicate Emerging Sinai Bedouin Insurgency By Chris Zambelis Egypt appears to have scored a number of successes in recent weeks in its war against Islamist militants. Counter-terrorist units and police converged on an olive grove in the mountainous area known as Gabal al-Arish on the outskirts of the northern Sinai coastal town of al-Arish last week after receiving a tip that members of the obscure Tawhid wal-Jihad (Monotheism and Struggle)—one of the main groups implicated in the deadly April attacks in Dahab and other strikes in Sinai—were hiding from the authorities (al-Sharq al-Awsat, May 9). After a...

JERUSALEM — Israeli military intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin told the Cabinet last week that an air force strike killed several Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian instructors sent to improve Hamas's military and missile capabilities. An Israeli soldier in an armored army vehicle after an operation in the Gaza Strip on March 2. AP/Sebastian Scheiner Yadlin said the death of the instructors marked a serious blow to the Hamas regime. The air force strike took place on Feb. 28 in which five people were killed in a truck filled with more than 100 missiles in the Gaza Strip. Officials said...

An Egyptian court on Saturday banned the armed wing of Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, declaring it a "terrorist" group, a judiciary official said. Since Egypt's military ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, the authorities have accused Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, of aiding jihadists who have increased their attacks on security forces in the Sinai Peninsula. Saturday's court verdict followed a complaint from a lawyer accusing the Hamas armed wing of direct involvement in "terrorist operations" in the Sinai, a court official said. The lawyer also accused the movement of using tunnels under the...

About 380 migrants are taken by bus to emergency housing in and around Paris PARIS—French police dismantled a makeshift migrant camp that had popped up in the heart of the capital, the latest sign of a major influx into Europe that France and other countries are struggling to contain. About 380 migrants from Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia had set up tents under a subway bridge in northern Paris—the largest migrant camp to appear in the city in recent years, according to authorities. The migrants, including about 76 women and children, were taken by bus Tuesday to emergency housing in and...

A pair of RAF Lakenheath based USAF F-15E Strike Eagles that were bristling with live bombs and air-to-air missiles, along five KC-135R tankers, flew on a secretive and grueling 12 hour mission over the Southern Mediterranean on Monday, May 25th, Memorial Day. Multiple radio interceptors and plane spotters state that four F-15E’s, callsigns ABLE 01 through 04, took off from their home base at RAF Lakenheath laden with yellow banded (live) AIM-9M sidewinders, AIM-120 AMRAAMS and no less than seven 500lb Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs). These aircraft were accompanied by five KC-135Rs tankers, callsign QUID 91 through 95, that...

The rebel group that has seized power in Yemen has taken at least four U.S. citizens prisoner, according to U.S. officials who said that efforts to secure the Americans’ release have faltered. One of the prisoners had been cleared for release in recent days only to have that decision reversed by members of the Houthi rebellion that toppled the U.S.-backed government earlier this year and now controls most levers of power in Yemen.

As the bloc’s 12 oil ministers meet in Vienna, the march of Isil jihadists in the Middle East is putting Iran and Saudi Arabia on a collision course with explosive consequences Thick black smoke rising from the Baiji oil refinery could be seen as a dirty smudge on the horizon as far away as Baghdad after fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) set fire to the enormous processing plant just over 100 miles north of the capital last week. The decision to torch the refinery, which once produced around a third of Iraq’s domestic fuel...

Saudi-led air strikes hit three military bases in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Saturday and the Yemeni government in exile expressed reservations about United Nations-led talks aimed at ending the eight-week war. Residents said the air raids hit a munitions store in one of the bases, setting off a large explosion which sent rockets flying into the air and crashing down on civilian areas...   Yemen's exiled government in Saudi Arabia headed by President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi expressed reluctance to attend UN-sponsored peace talks set for May 28 in Geneva. A spokesman said on Saturday the Houthis and their powerful...

[1]The Goldberg interview with Obama reads like a conversation with an idiot. Actually make that two idiots, both of whom are also compulsive liars.One of the highlights of their insane exchange is when Obama tries to insist that Iran won’t be more dangerous if it gets another $150 billion. Obama: The question is, if Iran has $150 billion parked outside the country, does the IRGC automatically get $150 billion? Does that $150 billion then translate by orders of magnitude into their capacity to project power throughout the region? So Obama brings out the math, and by math, I mean...

On Friday, President Obama spoke at a Jewish American Heritage Month celebration being held at the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington, D.C. Wearing a yarmulke, Obama addressed his Jewish gravitas, citing his two Jewish former chiefs of staff, saying he has been called America's "first Jewish president" by Jeffrey Goldberg, who recently interviewed him for The Atlantic. Goldberg was in attendance.

Goldberg: What is Obama seeking here, in your mind? Cotton: Well, I think he clearly wants to have a kind of grand rapprochement with Iran. This goes back to his actions in his earliest days, when he was silent in the face of [Iran's] Green Revolution, and even some of his statements in the campaign. Goldberg: What's wrong with wanting a grand rapprochement with Iran? Cotton: I would love to see that happen. As Secretary Schultz and Secretary Kissinger wrote, they've been in government when Iran was an ally, not just of the United States but of Israel. The Iranian...

A rare glimpse into Hezbollah's underground tunnels was provided on Friday by Lebanese publication As-Safir, which is associated with the militant organization. The report praised Hezbollah's activities and painted it as a strong army ready for battle. While it is difficult to verify the claims in the article, it contained a rare discussion of the tunnels by Hezbollah members. The reporter wrote that in order to meet Hezbollah fighters near the Israeli border in southern Lebanon, he travelled from the city of Tyre and was required to stop at a house known to locals as a Hezbollah headquarters, where he...

Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who’s in charge — while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America’s alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in freefall. It gets worse. The Gulf states’ top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama’s failed Camp David summit. “We were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years,” laments Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief.Note: “were,”...

ormer U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, in an interview with JTA, surmised that the next U.S. administration would be friendlier with Israel than the current one. The onetime vice presidential candidate also expressed concern over America’s nuclear negotiations with Iran, saying they are “going in a bad direction,” and urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to embrace the long-shelved Arab Peace Initiative. Lieberman predicted that if the 2016 presidential election were held today, a higher percentage of Jewish-Americans would vote Republican than in past races. But he noted that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the party’s front-runner for the Democratic...

Russia came in for harsh criticism last week when state-owned jet producer MiG delivered 12 MiG-29 planes to Sudan. Amnesty International suggested that the jets could be used against civilians in Sudan's western region of Darfur, where attacks against indigenous black tribes by the government-backed Arab janjaweed militia over the last 15 months have left at least 30,000 people dead, forced villagers into refugee camps and left some 2 million people without sufficient food and medicine. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton blasted MiG for selling modern weapons to a government the United States considers a sponsor of international terrorism....

The threat of a limited surgical naval or air force bombing of critical nuclear installations--with no ground troops The contention that there are only two options in dealing with the rogue Ayatollahs’ regime—negotiation or military option, which supposedly amounts to war—defies reality. Such a contention is either mistaken or misleading. The threat of a limited surgical naval or air force bombing of critical nuclear installations—with no ground troops - would not amount to a war, would deter the Ayatollahs, possibly moderating their nature, and—if activated - would permanently cripple their pursuit of nuclear capabilities, and could be repeated if necessary...