The United Nations, israel and the Palestinian Authority have reached a deal to allow reconstruction work to begin in the war-torn Gaza Strip with U.N. monitoring of the use of materials, U.N. Middle East envoy Robert Serry said on Tuesday. Serry told the U.N. Security Council that the United Nations had brokered the deal “to […] Read More → 
Some 500,000 children returned on Sunday to school in the Gaza Strip, where many will be given psychological counseling before regular studies begin after a devastating 50-day war between Palestinian militants and Israel. The opening of the school year had been delayed for three weeks because of damage to more than 250 schools and the […] Read More → 
The new U.N. human rights chief urged world powers on Monday to protect women and minorities targeted by Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, saying the fighters were trying to create a “house of blood”. Jordan’s Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, the first Muslim to hold the position, called for the international community to focus […] Read More → 
A long, long time ago, after three Jewish teens were kidnapped and murdered, after an Arab teen was then murdered, but before the rockets and the ground war and the funerals and the 12 cease-fires and the anguish and the destruction — this was a country overcome by collective guilt and horror, reeling from the […] Read More → 
Israel announced on Sunday a land appropriation in the occupied West Bank that an anti-settlement group termed the biggest in 30 years, drawing Palestinian condemnation and a U.S. rebuke. Some 400 hectares (988 acres) in the Etzion Jewish settlement bloc near Bethlehem were declared “state land, on the instructions of the political echelon” by the […] Read More → 
The Israeli military said it shot down an unmanned aircraft above the Israeli-held section of the Golan Heights, a plateau that’s become more volatile with Syrian rebels’ gains and confrontations with United Nations peacekeepers. Hours before a Patriot missile brought down the aircraft, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that his country was ready to […] Read More → 
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said threats from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda as well as Hezbollah and Iran led to his decision not to put “all assets” in one battle against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu’s comments came after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, writing in the New York Times, called for […] Read More → 
The cease-fire is holding. The sirens have stopped, the bomb shelters are being closed, most of the reservists have returned home. This weekend, for the first time in months, Israelis (like Gazans) will finally be able to exhale. But the press, quite rightly, is reminding Israelis that peace is almost certainly not at hand. “Gaza […] Read More → 
Scott McConnell Confronting the new Islamic State requires reevaluating old alliances and enemies. Though Congress and the president were out of town, the final weeks of August have seen the arrival of an unexpectedly critical moment. The brutal beheading of James Foley by ISIS (the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq) confirmed that there remains a […] Read More → 
An open-ended ceasefire in the Gaza war held on Wednesday as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced strong criticism in israel over a costly conflict with Palestinian militants in which no clear victor has emerged. On the streets of the battered, Hamas-run Palestinian enclave, people headed to shops and banks, trying to resume the normal pace […] Read More → 
For their own reasons, Israelis and Palestinians have traditionally been leery of involving the United Nations Security Council in mediating their long-running conflict. Now, though, after seven weeks of fighting in Gaza that has produced little other than death, misery, and destruction, that body represents the best hope for the two sides to achieve both […] Read More → 
Some years ago, soon after Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and shortly after the renewal of the Gaza “troubles” (to borrow phrase from the Irish), my wife and I visited friends in the small, Gaza-adjacent town of Shaar Hanegev. We were sitting in the dining room, eating dinner, when the table shook, ever so […] Read More →