Today’s Top Stories
1. Egypt banned Hamas (the “armed wing”) as a terror group. The organization’s “political wing” responded by announcing it will no longer accept Egypt as a mediator with Israel.
2. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah confirmed that Hezbollah and Iran are opening a new front against Israel from Syria.
The Shi’ite group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, gave a televised address in Lebanon in which he extolled the “fusion of Lebanese-Iranian blood on Syrian territory.”
3. The Mossad and the CIA worked together to assassinate Imad Mughniyah, according to the Washington Post:
Former U.S. officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operation, asserted that Mughniyah, although based in Syria, was directly connected to the arming and training of Shiite militias in Iraq that were targeting U.S. forces.
It took a followup piece to answer, Why now?
There are questions about the timing of the disclosures, released seven years after the assassination.
Talal Atrissi, an analyst who is close to Hezbollah, said that the disclosure could be interpreted by Hezbollah and Iran as an attempt by former and current U.S. officials as an attempt to scuttle the nuclear talks.
But Yossi Melman argues that the disclosures are a message to Israel.
4. Blatant Bias and Inept Journalism in The Independent: Multiple examples of flawed and biased journalism — conveniently rolled into one report.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Khaled Abu Toameh: Hamas and Hezbollah representatives met in Beirut Saturday to discuss coordination between two groups.
• Photo essays in the Washington Post and Daily Telegraph picked up on Hamas’s terror camp.
• Palestinian killed by IDF after throwing firebomb at Israeli vehicle. YNet coverage.
• JTA: Three-quarters of the US Senate have pledged not to support US aid to the PA until the Obama administration reviews the PA’s membership bid in the International Criminal Court.
• 18,000 Palestinians remain stranded in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, cut off from UN aid and caught between the army and Islamist rebels, according to Reuters.
• Can you imagine the outrage if Israel did this?
Mideast Matters
• The Daily Telegraph, New York Times, and Christian Science Monitor visited Israel’s northern border, where residents voiced their concerns about Hezbollah digging terror tunnels.
Kobi Cohen, deputy head of security for Zarit, says the community has been hearing unusual sounds for a few years.
“It started with small noises, like a hammer and anvil,” Mr. Cohen told a group of visiting journalists last month. “The noise [became] so intense that people’s furniture and objects in their homes actually moved.”
• According to Israeli media reports,
. . . the US has already agreed in principle to a deal that would leave Iran capable of enriching enough uranium for a nuclear bomb within “mere months.
Israel Channel 10 TV news said the deal taking shape would allow Iran to continue enriching uranium in “over 7,000? centrifuges. It quoted unnamed Jerusalem sources saying the terms of the deal would leave Iran “closer than was thought” to nuclear weapons, “mere months from producing enough material for a bomb,” and that the US has agreed to 80% of Iran’s demands.
• Jonathan Tepperman of Foreign Affairs interviewed Bashar Assad. More noteworthy, however, are Tepperman’s impressions of Assad, which he wrote in a separate Washington Post commentary and expanded on in a worthwhile and blunt video explaining the story behind the story.
• Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has been feuding with the Argentine intelligence community for years over her deal with Iran to jointly investigate the AMIA bombing. According to Reuters:
However, some of the spy agency’s leaders felt betrayed by the deal, a source with knowledge of the agency’s affairs said on condition of anonymity. They had spent many years helping prosecutors build the case against Iran, and saw Fernandez’s agreement as an attempt to whitewash their investigation.
“It was like she switched sides . . . and was suddenly friends with Iran,” the source said. “That’s what this (dispute) is all about.”
A government official confirmed the Iran deal was the origin of the conflict, which he described as a grave threat to Fernandez.
• ISIS’ Egyptian “branch” took credit for a string of Sinai terror attacks that killed 27 people on Friday.
• The Hypocrisy of Iran’s Holocaust Cartoon Contest
• Google official to EU: With 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, its impossible for us to catch all the terror videos posted online. Is pre-screening a viable option? Depends on who you ask. AP coverage.
Commentary/Analysis
• Josh Gleis is worth reading: 10 Lessons Learned by Hezbollah from Israel’s Summer War in Gaza
• Israel needs to change the security equation with Hezbollah by reassessing Bashar Assad’s usefulness, argues Efraim Inbar. He offers several reasons why toppling Assad is in Israeli interests. Here are just two:
A Hezbollah? without Iranian control of Damascus might spare Israel the need to intervene militarily in Lebanon in order to deal with the missile threat.
If Assad falls, it is not clear what will happen in Syria, but it is certain that Sunni radical groups will be more influential and the struggle over controlling parts of the country will continue. Yet, substate groups are generally less of a security threat than states.
• For more commentary/analyiss, see Zvi Barel (Egypt’s turning on Hamas won’t solve Israel’s Gaza problem), Giora Eiland (Israel needs to deter Lebanon, not just Hezbollah), Michael Young (New rules of the game are emerging in the Golan), Dore Gold (Iranian expansionism and the nuclear talks), Michael Singh (Washington shouldn’t pin its hopes on Rouhani), Charles Krauthammer (Do we really mean “never again?”), and Alan Dershowitz (Confronting European anti-Semitism).
Featured image: CC BY Moses Mehraban via flickr with additions by HonestReporting; F-15 CC BY-NC flickr/Israel Defense Forces
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
