General Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by the United States last week, has been described as the “single most powerful operative in the Middle East today”. His two-decade leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp’s Quds Force has seen the Islamic Republic’s influence and power in the region seemingly expand – but at a cost of tens[…]
Israel and Hamas appear to be edging towards a long-term truce, designed to bring peace to the border region and relief to the Gaza Strip. Israeli media reports in recent days have emphasised that the IDF’s killing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander Baha Abu al-Ata last month has breathed new life into long-standing efforts to[…]
Israelis and Palestinians have already paid a high price for the mounting tensions between Iran and the United States. According to The Times this week, “a key meeting” was recently held in Beirut between Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Al-Quds Brigade, and Ziyad al-Nakhalah, leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The apparent result: last weekend’s barrage[…]
A weekend of violence – in which nearly 700 rockets, missiles and mortars were fired from Gaza towards Israel, purposefully targeting Israeli civilians – has given way this week to a tense ceasefire. Four Israeli civilians were killed and 142 were injured, including four in critical condition. Palestinian medical officials reported 27 deaths since Friday, including[…]
Hamas’ twin-track strategy – to bring calm to Gaza while stoking terror in the West Bank – has been on graphic display over the past week. Leaders of the terror group, which rules the coastal enclave, were in talks with senior Egyptian intelligence officials on Thursday evening when two rockets were fired from the Strip[…]
Labour Friends of Israel Annual Lunch, 27 November 2018 Remarks by the Ambassador of Israel, HE Mark Regev. Check against delivery. Chief Rabbi, Chair of the Jewish Agency, Isaac Herzog, Deputy Leader, Tom Watson, Chair of LFI, Joan Ryan, Parliamentarians and friends, And a very special thanks to Sir David and Isaac for helping[…]
*** CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY *** Rt Hon Joan Ryan MP Labour Friends of Israel Annual Lunch 2018 Chief Rabbi, Ambassador Regev, friends Thank you to all of you for being here today. In particular, I want to thank Sir David Garrard and Isaac Kaye, our long-standing lunch sponsors. I also want to thank all of my parliamentary colleagues who[…]
Ordinary Gazans oppose the bloody, Hamas-led weekly border protests and want a ceasefire with Israel, newly released polling shows. The research – carried out among representative samples of approximately 500 randomly selected Gazans during early October by the Bethlehem-based Palestine Centre for Public Opinion and by a Ramallah-based organisation – shows the conflict-weary population of the Gaza Strip[…]
The “machineries of repression” utilised by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to crush their opponents and silence dissenters has been detailed in a shocking new report by Human Rights Watch. A two-year investigation by HRW, Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent, accuses both the PA, which runs the West Bank, and Gaza’s Islamist rulers, Hamas, of[…]
Jeremy Corbyn’s past links with Hamas have come under intense scrutiny this week, as the fallout from Labour’s failure to adopt the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-semitism continues. On Monday, it was revealed that the Labour leader had chaired a panel at a conference in Doha in 2012 which was also attended[…]