Free Republic

Dan Shapiro: ‘We’ll seek to help moderate Palestinians become stronger in Gaza,’ since they’d run it better than ‘Hamas, a terrorist group’ The US wants to see Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority restored to ruling Gaza after the current conflict is over, and will make efforts to bring this about, American Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro indicated Saturday night. In an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 news, Shapiro was asked about the unity government formed last month by Abbas’s Fatah faction and Hamas. He did not reply directly and instead noted that Abbas was currently in close contact with Egypt, trying...

Cairo (AFP) - Egypt's military said militants firing machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades attacked a border guards checkpoint Saturday, killing 21 soldiers in one of the biggest assaults since Islamist president Mohamed Morsi's ouster. The attack in a desert area 630 kilometres (390 miles) west of Cairo left four soldiers wounded, the military said in a statement, blaming "terrorists". It said a rocket propelled grenade fired by the militants set off an explosion in an ammunition depot at the El-Farafrah post, killing the soldiers. Militants have stepped up attacks on the security forces since Morsi was toppled in July 2013...

Jihadists have killed 270 Syrian regime fighters, civilian security guards and employees since seizing a gas field in Homs province, a monitoring group said Friday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights described Thursday's takeover of the Shaar field as "the biggest" anti-regime operation by the Islamic State (IS) since it emerged in the Syrian conflict last year. The watchdog, updating an earlier toll of 115, said it had documented "the death of 270 people killed in the fighting or executed" since Thursday. "A large majority of the men killed were executed at gunpoint after being taken prisoner following the takeover...

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday slammed Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as an “illegitimate tyrant” and said Cairo could not be relied upon to negotiate a truce with Israel. "Is Sisi a party (to a ceasefire)? Sisi is a tyrant himself," Erdogan was quoted by the AFP news agency as having told reporters. "He is not different from the others," he said, adding that it was Egypt's current rulers who were blocking humanitarian aid channels to Gaza. Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri responded and said Erdogan's comments were "unacceptable". "They have no link with the events in...

Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri says Cairo's offer 'provides the needs of all sides.' Egypt does not have any plans to revise its ceasefire proposal to end the fighting in Gaza, Foreign Minister Sameh Shukrisaid in a joint press conference with his French counterpart Laurent Fabius in Cairo. "It provides the needs of all sides and we will continue to offer it, hoping to get their support as soon as possible," said Shukri, referring to the initiative rejected by Hamas. On Friday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas asked France to use its influence on Hamas allies such as Turkey and Qatar to...

Palestinian and other Arab commentators are blasting Egypt's cease-fire offer this week in the Israeli-Gazan fighting, saying it was a gift to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who accepted it, and a trap for Hamas, which rejected it. Azmi Bishara, the fugitive former Knesset member who now heads the Arab Center for Research and Policy in Doha, Qatar, wrote in the pan-Arab alaraby.co.uk that the offer gave no relief to Gaza, nor freedom for the Hamas members recently returned to Israeli prisons. "This Egyptian declaration represents a stab in the back to the resistance and the people of Gaza. … [T]his...

A Mashable investigation shows that aircraft from many nations, including the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, routinely fly at high altitudes over tense conflict zones such as Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. In the wake of the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on Thursday, such overflights may be reexamined. Aviation regulators, including the Federal Aviation Administration, issue warnings to pilots based on information about any hazards, including military activity in the area of a planned route of flight. For example, in the days leading up to the Malaysia Airlines crash, the FAA banned American carriers from flying...

“ The region has seen nothing like it since the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. Perpetual war has turned into a snowball that accumulates people and resources as it rolls downhill and strips the ground bare of sustenance. Those who are left shiver in tents in refugee camps, and their young men go off to the war. There is nothing new about this way of waging war; it was invented in the West during the Thirty Years War by the imperial general Albrecht von Wallenstein, and it caused the death of nearly half the population of Central Europe between...

At a time when Hamas continues to fire salvos of rockets into Israel while rejecting a ceasefire proposal, the United States has finalized a deal to provide the Palestinian terrorist group’s leading supporter, Qatar, with weaponry worth $11 billion.The deal signed at the Pentagon Monday by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and his Qatari counterpart comes just months after a senior U.S. Treasury official in a speech deplored Qatar’s open support for Hamas, and covert funding for jihadists in Syria, including the al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra and the al-Qaeda offshoot the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS

The Kurdish zone is not only in Northern Iraq but in parts of Syria and Turkey also. Here Syrian Kurds lure in a curious ISIS fighter with a bait car and take him out. Notice the lack of “AllahAkbars.”

The German government is expecting around 175,000 people to file applications for asylum this year, the highest number in two decades. Regional politicians are acting surprised, but there have been signs of this development for years now. […] The refugees in Germany are fleeing many things: the civil war in Syria, the recent wave of terror in Iraq, torturous regimes but also, in many cases, a life of poverty and no prospects, be it in Africa or as a member of the Roma minority in Serbia. Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) estimates that as many as 175,000...

A recent United Nations report, still classified, confirms that Iran is implicated in exporting longer-range missiles to the region, such as the M-302 rockets launched from Gaza. UNITED NATIONS, N.Y. — Evidence that Hamas is firing more sophisticated weapons at Israel – including longer-range rockets – than in past conflicts is focusing a new light on Iran’s role in arming the militant organization....

The celebrations in Israel Tuesday morning over the Egyptian ceasefire initiative were premature. Contrary to the assessment of all manner of eminent Israeli notables, Hamas is not sufficiently weakened to accept an immediate ceasefire that meets none of its demands. Far from it. As Hamas made clear in the course of a rocket-filled Tuesday, it doesn’t give a damn about Egypt or Arab public opinion, and it is continuing on its own path, one of escalation. You can say a lot to Hamas’s detriment in its handling of this conflict: It was wrong to enter this round of hostilities and...

Military sending voice messages advising Palestinians to vacate by 8 a.m. Wednesday as part of efforts to avoid causing harm to civilians ahead of supposed strikes; Hamas urges residents against heeding IDF calls. The IDF was sending voice messages to residents of the northern Gaza Strip late on Tuesday, advising them to evacuate their homes by 8 a.m. as part of Israeli efforts to avoid causing harm to civilians ahead of supposed strikes. Hamas' Interior Ministry urged residents of Gaza not to heed to the IDF calls to leave their homes, saying the warning were part of Israel's "psychological war."

Qatar, the world’s top liquefied natural gas exporter, is using its gas money to cash in on some top-of-the-line U.S. supplied military hardware. Qatar’s defense minister, Hamad Bin Ali al-Attiyah, met with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and signed acceptance letters for $11 billion worth of Apache attack helicopters, Patriot missile defense batteries and anti-tank Javelin missiles, the Pentagon said in a statement Monday. “Today’s signing ceremony underscores the strong partnership between the United States and Qatar in the area of security and defense and will help improve our bilateral cooperation across a range of military operations,” said Rear Adm....

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who for years has been on record supporting the idea of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, appears to have abandoned the idea, according to The Times of Israel. "He made explicitly clear that he could never, ever, countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank," the Times reported. While he did not renounce support for the two-state solution, his comments reflected a view that he believes such a state is no longer a possibility after Israel repeatedly evacuated Arab territories only for it to come under the control of Palestinian extremists...

Despite devastation in Gaza, and its inability to inflict Israeli casualties, the organization is in robust shape — personnel unharmed, rocket supplies plentiful, popularity soaring. headquarters and the IDF have been repeating over the past two days assertions like “Hamas is frustrated” and “Hamas wants a ceasefire.”In principle, they’re right,but those statements must be accompanied by two critical caveats that in practice prevent a halt in the fighting. True, Gaza’s Hamas rulers are frustrated to a certain extent. They aren’t happy that the almost 1,000 rockets they’ve fired at Israel so far have caused few injuries and haven’t even significantly...

ISIS unveils ‘cabinet’ lineup: report By Staff writer | Al Arabiya News Friday, 11 July 2014 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), has reportedly formed a cabinet to be in charge of his newly established “caliphate.” Documents published by The Telegraph newspaper this week revealed for the first time in details the structure of the group, which has claimed universal authority throughout the Muslim world, declaring Baghdadi its caliph. The British newspaper published an infograph that explains the leadership arrangement under Baghdadi, based on documents seized from an ISIS member’s house...

The death toll in Syria’s three-year war has eclipsed 170,000 people, one-third of them civilians, a monitoring group said in a new toll released on Thursday. “Ever since the first casualty of the Syrian revolution was registered on March 18, 2011 in Daraa province, the deaths of 171,509 people have been documented,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Among the dead were 56,495 civilians, including 9,092 children, according to the toll, which included casualties documented up to July 8 this year. Another 65,803 were regime troops and pro-regime militiamen, while 46,301 were rebels seeking President Bashar Al Assad’s ouster...

HERMEL, Lebanon: Further fighting broke out Monday night along the Lebanese-Syrian border following fierce battles which flared over the weekend between Syrian rebels and Hezbollah as the group seeks to root out the last opposition fighters from the region. At least seven Hezbollah fighters and over 30 Syrian rebels were killed in the clashes, which erupted Saturday night in the border area between Baalbek, Arsal and the Syrian village of Nahleh, sources told The Daily Star. In April, Syrian forces backed by allied fighters from Hezbollah retook control of most of the Qalamoun region. According to a high-level source, Hezbollah...