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The deputy to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Saturday that Iran was a friend of Israel, Iranian news agencies reported. "Iran wants no war with any country, and today Iran is friend of the United States and even Israel.... Our achievements belong to the whole world and should be used for expanding love and peace," said Iranian Vice President Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, who is also head of the Cultural Heritage Organization. The Cultural Heritage Organization news agency quoted him as saying that even during the eight-year war against Iraq, Iran just defended itself against the military invasion by former Iraqi dictator...

The second matter at hand is the continued presence of American troops in Iraq. Israel is concerned a hasty withdrawal by the US will strengthen Iran and further destabilize the Middle East. Obama has promised voters that, if elected, he will immediately start implementing a 16-month timetable to withdraw all American troops from Iraq. The senator has said the war there cannot be won and US involvement in Iraq is what is preventing Washington from dealing with the Al-Qaeda terror threat on the Afghan-Pakistani border and the Iranian threat.

Iran was given a fortnight to agree to freeze its uranium enrichment programme yesterday or face further international isolation. After a day of inconclusive talks in Geneva, a six-nation negotiating team warned the Iranian delegation that it had run out of patience and demanded a 'yes or no' answer to a proposal it put forward five weeks ago.

Critical talks in Switzerland over Iran's nuclear program began today with Iranian and United States officials making their highest-level diplomatic contacts since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Iran's top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana smiled as they posed for pictures before heading into the closed-door meetings which will include U.S. undersecretary William J. Burns, the State Department's No. 3 official.

Iran said on Friday it did not expect an attack from Israel or the United States triggered by the long-running dispute over its nuclear programme. "The possibility of such an attack (from Israel or the U.S.) is almost zero," Mottaki said, via a translator, in an interview with Turkish broadcaster NTV during a visit to Turkey. However, when asked whether it meant Iran was ready to freeze any expansion of its nuclear programme in return for the U.N. Security Council halting further sanctions measures against it, the source said "not at all".

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is slated to meet with Barack Obama. Photo: AP While the European leg of Barack Obama’s much-touted overseas trip will take him to nations where he’s vastly more popular than John McCain, Obama is not nearly as well liked in Israel. Polls there show Israelis prefer John McCain by as much as 20 percentage points.

The Saudi king's talk of tolerance and moderation notwithstanding, the Jewish state is proving to be a divisive issue at the religious conference that the Saudi monarch has convened here. The conference, the theme of which is interfaith dialogue, is an effort by the Saudi monarch to foster more cordial relations between imams in his country and Christian and Jewish religious leaders in the West. The conference is also drawing notice because Abdullah, whose kingdom includes the sites of Islam's two holiest places, denounced religious extremism during his address on Wednesday to the Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish leaders...

Friends in Washington send me e-mails: They want to know if Israel is getting ready to bomb Iran's nuclear installations. This is the Bush Era: If you will it, no Middle East war is impossible. And in the last few weeks, there has been a gale of hints, threats, and leaks. U.S. officials, none named, told The New York Times that an Israeli military exercise last month was "a rehearsal" for striking Iran. Shaul Mofaz, the remarkably mediocre ex-military chief of staff campaigning to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that an Israeli attack was "unavoidable." A notoriously unreliable reporter...

Today, Lebanon’s March 14th movement cast itself into an abyss of moral depravity that the bloc’s supporters — myself included — never thought possible. The exchange this morning of bodies for terrorists between Israel and Hezbollah presented March 14’s leaders with what should have been an easy choice: applaud the return to Lebanon of a grotesque child-murderer; say nothing; or denounce him and Hezbollah’s freelance deal-making, which made his return possible. Two of March 14th’s leaders — Fouad Siniora, the Sunni prime minister of Lebanon, and Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s Druze, both of whom are embraced as American...

A Shia imam in Saudi Arabia has declared his support for Iran and called on supporters to send money to the country to help it fight against the United States and Israel. "We stand by Iran and we will do everything to support this country," said Shia imam Namer Baqer al-Namer during a sermon he gave at the Imam Hussein mosque in the eastern village al-Awamiya on Friday. The sermon was published on the imam's Internet site on Tuesday. A Saudi citizen, al-Namer said that he felt very close to Iran for his Shia belief and called on the faithful...

TEHRAN — Iran's top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili on Friday expressed optimism that weekend talks attended for the first time by the United States over their nuclear standoff would be constructive, provided Washington came with the right approach. "What is important for us is with what approach they come to the talks. If it is with a constructive approach, and that they refrain from past mistakes, then for sure we will have constructive talks," he was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency before leaving Tehran for Geneva.... And in a major policy shift by Washington, US Under-secretary...

(IsraelNN.com) The Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) and Israeli police have arrested and charged six Israeli-Arabs, among them Hebrew University students, for planning an Al-Qaeda attack on a senior US official. The group, including four residents of eastern Jerusalem, are suspected of operating an al-Qaeda cell in Israel's capital and planning to shoot down a helicopter carrying a senior US official. The six suspects were identified by police as: Ibrahim Nashef, 22, of Tayibe: Physics and computer sciences student at the Hebrew University; Muhammad Najem, 24, of Nazareth: Chemistry student at the Hebrew University; Anas Shawiki, 21, of the Jerusalem...

"I'm jealous of the Zionists, who don't spare any effort in bringing back captured soldiers or soldiers' bodies," convicted killer Samir Kuntar, who was released Wednesday in Israel's prisoner swap with Hizbullah, told the group's Al Manar TV on Thursday night. "Seriously, we are jealous of our enemy and its care for a [body] and how it goes to the end of the world in order to return it, and of its concerns for captives and how it will go to the very edge to bring them back," he said. Kuntar blasted Arab nations for not doing enough in the...

Haifa, Israel - Of all the stops on Barack Obama’s upcoming swing through Europe and the Middle East, it is his visit to Israel that has received the most attention, but not because of his popularity here. Polls indicate that Israelis evince some of the lowest levels of support for Obama of any country in the world. In France and Germany, both stops on Obama’s tour, respectively 65% and 67% of the population has said that they would vote for him if they could. By contrast, in Israel, where he is due for 24 hours on July 22 to July...

What can you say about a people who welcome a child murderer as a hero? Most Americans are familiar with the brutal murder of wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. Terrorists led by Abu Abbas (who was later given safe haven in Baghdad by Saddam Hussein) took the ship captive and threw Klinghoffer overboard. But few recall that the ship was seized to bargain for the release of, among others, Samir Kuntar from an Israeli prison. Kuntar had taken part in an earlier terror attack. In 1979, as a 16-year-old, he and four others had...

Putting decades of vicious sectarian, political and personality differences aside, Lebanon's body politic came together Wednesday night in a heartfelt display of national unity: Samir Kuntar had been brought home. After a nearly 30-year absence, there he stood before the frantic multitude, this progeny of Lebanon - whose road to manhood took him from out-of-control juvenile delinquent to adolescent child-killer to unremorseful mature terrorist - in army fatigues, waving the Lebanese and Hizbullah flags, arm outstretched in the Hizbullah salute, a manic glint in his eyes. A true son of his country. In a flash, the face of the new...

6 Arabs, including 2 Hebrew University students, suspected of setting up J'lem Al-Qaida cell, 1 allegedly plotted to bomb Bush's helicopter. Four Israeli Arabs from east Jerusalem and two from Nazareth have been indicted for allegedly setting up an Al-Qaida cell in the capital and offering their services to Global Jihad elements, security officials announced Friday. One of the suspects allegedly made contact with those elements in an attempt to assassinate US President George W. Bush during his visit to Israel in May. The group, arrested in a joint Shin Bet-Israel Police investigation, includes two Hebrew University students, one of...

Hizbullah is bolstering its presence in south Lebanon villages with non-Shi'ite majorities by buying land and using it to build military positions and store missiles and launchers, The Jerusalem Post has learned. The decision to build infrastructure in non-Shi'ite villages - where Hizbullah has less support - is part of the group's post-war strategy under which it has mostly abandoned the "nature reserves," forested areas in southern Lebanon where it kept most of its Katyusha rocket launchers before the Second Lebanon War. Behind the change is the mandate given to UNIFIL by the United Nations after the war in 2006....

Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, who stands a good chance of becoming prime minister shortly after September's Kadima primary, defended his hawkish statements about a prospective attack on Iran this week in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. Mofaz was blamed for a record rise in gas prices worldwide after he told Yediot Aharonot on June 6 that Israel would attack Iran if it did not cease nuclear development. The newspaper quoted him as saying that the sanctions against Iran were ineffective and therefore "there will be no choice but to attack Iran to halt the Iranian nuclear program."

MY greatest worry on Iran's nuclear threat to civilization isn't the military option. It's trying that option on the cheap. If there's any way to block Tehran's pursuit of nukes short of warfare, I'm all for it. Maybe yesterday's dispatch of the No. 3 US diplomat to observe the European Union's talks with the mullahs about their nukes will work a miracle (don't hold your breath). Military strikes must be the last resort. Even a successful attack would panic oil markets, interrupt supplies to an unknown degree and make enemies of the Iranian people for another generation. But the fanatics...

LEBANON'S new telecommunications minister has accused Israel of bombarding Lebanese people with threatening phone calls, a day after a controversial prisoner swap between Israel and Hezbollah. "Hundreds of people throughout Lebanon received threatening phone calls on their landlines from Israel,'' Gibran Bassil said overnight. "The phone would ring, the person would answer and they would hear a message saying, 'This is from the state of Israel. Abandon Hezbollah or there will be another war, like there was in 2006,''' he said. Mr Bassil, a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, the main Christian party in the Syrian-backed opposition, said he...

Meretz MK Yossi Beilin on Thursday called on European countries to declare how many Palestinian refugees and their descendants they would be willing to absorb as part of any future peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. "It is important that we know now how many Palestinian refugees [third] countries are willing to absorb, so that when we get to the critical moment [of a peace agreement] we will be prepared for such an eventuality, and be able to carry it out," Beilin said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. The dovish lawmaker made the remarks one day after...

That’s one of the more disturbing headlines I’ve written, but it’s completely accurate to describe this utterly depraved Hamas TV show, in which Assud the giant Jew-eating rabbit is tempted by Satan to steal and then is sentenced by ghoulish child host Saraa to have his hand chopped off. The wonders of sharia. (Courtesy of MEMRI TV.) Following are excerpts from a Hamas children’s show, titled “The Pioneers of Tomorrow,” which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on July 11, 2008. Assud the bunny: In the name of Allah, I hope my dad doesn’t see me. God, make him go on sleeping,...

For two years, the father of Israeli soldier Eldad Regev never lost hope that his son might return home alive. But on Wednesday morning, sitting with his wife and relatives, Tzvi Regev watched on TV as a Lebanese vehicle pulled up at the Israeli border post. Red Cross workers unloaded two black lacquered coffins, confirming the terrible truth: Eldad Regev was dead.

An Israeli attack on Iran seems inevitable. If it succeeds, it will return to Israel its deterrent power and send a clear message to the saber-rattling jihadists that they were too early in beginning the countdown for the disappearance of the Jewish state. If it fails, or fails to achieve the majority of its objectives, it could amount to an act of national suicide. Fanatical Muslims on every side will be encouraged by the failure and outcome of an Iranian retaliation which would cause heavy damage to the whole center of our country. Iran would unquestionably be joined by its...

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday I wonder whether the US administration even noticed the statement made by a senior Lebanese cleric last week: that Hizbullah will liberate seven abandoned Shi'ite villages located in pre-1967 Israel. I certainly hope so - because this comment epitomizes what is wrong with Washington's policy of pressing Israel to cede Shaba Farms to Lebanon. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday Photo: AP Shaba, located where Israel, Syria and Lebanon meet, was excluded from Israel's 2000 pullout from Lebanon because UN mapping experts ruled that it was Syrian rather than Lebanese....

It has become fashionable to look to the lessons of the peace process in Northern Ireland as holding insights for other areas of conflict in the world. However, this has been done in an uncritical way, often more focused on contemporary agendas than on the core realities unique to the region, which do not necessarily translate elsewhere.

US may sell shore-hugging combat ships to Israel Wed Jul 16, 2008 5:59pm EDT WASHINGTON, July 16 (Reuters) - The Pentagon has notified Congress of the possible sale to Israel of shore-hugging combat ships, spare parts, software and other goods and services worth as much as $1.9 billion. The main contractors for the deal would be Lockheed Martin (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), General Dynamics (GD.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Raytheon (RTN.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees foreign arms sales, said on Wednesday. Israel has requested permission to buy up...

Israel and Hezbollah completed the prisoner swap Wednesday: Hezbollah returned the bodies of abducted Israel Defense Forces soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, while Israel handed over terrorist Samir Kuntar and four Hezbollah militants, as well as 197 bodies. Now that the exchange has taken place, the Israeli defense establishment is worried that Hezbollah may seek a calculated escalation along the Lebanese border, and try to disrupt Israel Air Force flyovers in Lebanese airspace. Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah ended his public reclusion for a few minutes Wednesday, appearing in person at the Beirut celebration for the freed prisoners. Nasrallah...

TODAY, Israel is set to undertake an incredibly wrongheaded prisoner exchange with the terrorist group Hezbollah. It's just the latest move in a troubling trend of unequal deals between the Jewish state and its declared enemies. The swap, approved overwhelmingly by the Israeli cabinet, has the Israelis handing over five Lebanese prisoners, including the notorious terrorist Samir Kuntar, plus the bodies of 199 Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorists. In exchange, it will get two soldiers captured by Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 - though it's widely expected that it will only receive their remains - plus an 80-page Hezbollah report...

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah is the most admired leader among the Arab public, a survey released Wednesday showed. Twenty-six percent of respondents in six countries selected Nasrallah as their most admired leader, compared to 16% who chose Syrian President Bashar Assad and 10% who picked Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to the survey published by the the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington. The poll was published the same day Israel completed a lopsided prisoner swap with Hizbullah that is likely to further boost Nasrallah's standing in the Arab world. The Shi'ite Hizbullah leader was also the top...

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Five Lebanese freed from captivity in Israel were flown to a heroes' welcome in Beirut on Wednesday after Hezbollah returned the bodies of two Israeli soldiers seized in a cross-border raid in 2006.

If they knew the full story of unintended consequences, Arabs might think twice about hailing as a hero the Lebanese terrorist who bashed a little girl's head against a rock and is being released by Israel in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers. The terrorist is Samir Kuntar. He was captured after he and three other Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) operatives landed on an Israel beach in 1979. During the attack, Kuntar smashed a 4-year-old girl's head against a rock, killing her. He also killed her father. The girl's 2-year-old sister was accidentally suffocated by her mother, who...

Commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said his troops are getting more prepared to face "asymmetrical" security, political, cultural and military threats, the official IRNA news agency reported Wednesday. Addressing a group of IRGC officials on Tuesday, Jafari said enemies of Iran "are not capable of posing any direct threat or taking open action" against the Islamic Republic. "The U.S. and Israel have become aware of their weakness against our country and due to the same reason they try to put Iran under pressure through different sanctions," he said.

Director of the US Missile Defense Agency, Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, says Iran would develop missiles that could hit the US by 2015 to 2017. “There is good evidence that they (Iranians) are developing longer and longer range missiles and that they are planning to have this capability over the near future,” Obering said at a technical missile defense briefing on Iran's recent missile tests on Tuesday. “If you look at the assessment by the Intel community, they say that by about 2015, 2017, in that timeframe, they may even have a missile that can reach the United States, which...

The Palestinian Authority (PA) recently asked U.S. federal courts to reopen cases it lost after refusing to defend itself against terror-funding charges. Judgments would come from U.S. and international aid, the PA argues. In both cases, Palestinian terrorists murdered American citizens. In New York, Aharon Ellis' widow sued the PA for the lethal 2002 shooting of her husband and the father of their six children, during an Al Aqsa Martyr Brigade attack of a Bat Mitzvah, in Israel. The court awarded Leslye Knox $193 million, including interest, but the PA refuses to pay. A Rhode Island case centers on the...

President George W Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official.

Iran can deter any threats against it, the head of the Revolutionary Guards said in comments published on Wednesday, after the country's air force announced plans for a military exercise to help deter its foes. Iran is embroiled in a deepening international standoff over its nuclear program, which the United States and Israel suspect is aimed at making bombs, a charge Tehran denies.

Two years after Israeli reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were abducted by Hezbollah guerillas in a cross-border raid, coffins said to contain their bodies were taken to the Lebanese side of its border with Israel as part of a prisoner exchange to bring them home. The swap, overwhelmingly approved Tuesday by the cabinet, began at around 9 A.M. Wednesday at the Rosh Hanikra crossing, under the auspices of the International Red Cross Committee. A convoy carrying the bodies of the two Israelis reached the Rosh Hanikra crossing on the Lebanese side of the border at about 8:30 A.M., where...

I got married last week. Hence my absence from this space for the first time in seven years. It was a beautiful wedding in Acre, Israel, overlooking the ocean at sunset. My father wrote the music for the processional, which brought everyone to tears. My bride looked stunning, of course. We broke the glass, we danced, we ate and we celebrated until deep into the night. Outside the wedding hall stood a guard. Every wedding in Israel requires an armed guard to prevent terrorist attacks. Only the armed guards prevent the infliction of mass casualties at joyous events; only the...

Palestinian contributions to the world Posted: July 04, 20082:34 am Eastern © 2008  Yesterday morning, I listened to Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman describe the terrorist attack in Jerusalem in which a Palestinian construction worker suddenly turned the bulldozer he was driving into traffic, crushing everything (and everyone) in its path.The attack took place on one of Jerusalem's busiest streets. Ambassador Gillerman noted sarcastically that the driver "courteously" stopped to let a car pull in front of him, which he then ran over and crushed, killing a woman and her baby. In another car, a woman threw her baby out the car...

Tony Blair has been forced to abandon a visit to Gaza today because of specific threats to his life. The tour, which was cancelled after a warning by the Israeli government, dashed the hopes of Gaza's Hamas governors of scoring a propaganda coup as Mr Blair was due to be the first senior Western politician to visit the isolated strip since the Islamist group took control. Mr Blair's convoy first delayed a planned 9am arrival, then, as it approached Israel's Erez crossing into the often-turbulent strip, turned back to Jerusalem after being told of the threat. "We received a specific...

Samir Kuntar and four Lebanese prisoners captured in the Second Lebanon War will receive an official state welcoming when they are released by Israel on Wednesday as part of the prisoner swap with Hizbullah. The five men will be greeted at Beirut's airport by Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and President Michel Suleiman. Later, a huge rally will be held in the capital's southern suburbs where Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah will speak, the group's Al-Manar TV has said. French news agency AFP reports that the coastal road from the Israeli border to the southern port city of Sidon has been...

Liberated after six years of jungle captivity, Franco-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt exclaimed: "I think only the Israelis can possibly pull off something like this." If only.

Senator Barack Obama, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, will meet with Palestinian leaders in the West Bank during his trip overseas next week, the first details of which began to emerge on Monday. “I did not use those occasions to criticize Mr. Obama,” Mr. McCain said, adding that he “would prefer not to do so today.” “But he suggested in his speeches here and there that I turned my back on comprehensive reform out of political necessity,” Mr. McCain said. The reality, Mr. McCain said, is that he risked “political suicide” by teaming up with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat...

At the end of the week, Saeed Jalili, Iran's nuclear negotiator, is scheduled to arrive in Geneva for yet another round of talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. It is unclear what the two have to discuss. On July 4, the Iranians sent their written response to the West's latest offer to appease them. In and of itself, the offer, made by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany and communicated to Iran by Solana, constituted a major achievement for the Iranians. It promised civilian nuclear power plants, economic assistance, new airplanes, agricultural assistance,...

In a Wall Street Journal editorial, the leading voice of Washington's hawks warned that time is running out for efforts to stop the Islamic Republic's covert nuclear research programme. Recent tests of ballistic missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv had demonstrated the external threat posed to the Jewish state by a nuclear-armed Tehran. While the Bush administration no longer appears interested in military action against Iran, there is no doubt about Israel's intentions.

Preparations are in full swing in Lebanon to celebrate the return of Samir Kuntar. Kuntar, who is serving multiple life sentences for one of the most brutal terrorist attacks in Israel's history, is due to be released tomorrow as part of a prisoner exchange with Hizbullah for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two soldiers abducted in a July 2006 cross-border raid that triggered the Second Lebanon War. According to the Lebanese media, Kuntar will be given a festive reception by Hizbullah at its headquarters in southern Beirut, and welcomed personally by its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. He will then...

Palestinian Authority officials on Monday welcomed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's plans to visit Ramallah next week, saying they would brief him on the situation in the PA territories and the status of peace talks with Israel. The officials, however, warned that Obama's meeting with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, slated for July 23, did not mean that the Palestinians favor Obama over his Republican rival John McCain. "The Palestinians don't interfere in the internal affairs of the US," a top PA official told The Jerusalem Post. "Obama's visit to Ramallah does not mean that we have endorsed him." Another PA...

Iran's test salvo of ballistic missiles last week together with recent threatening rhetoric by commanders of the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guards emphasizes how close the Middle East is to a fundamental, in fact an irreversible, turning point. Tehran's efforts to intimidate the United States and Israel from using military force against its nuclear program, combined with yet another diplomatic charm offensive with the Europeans, are two sides of the same policy coin. The regime is buying the short additional period of time it needs to produce deliverable nuclear weapons, the strategic objective it has been pursuing clandestinely for 20 years...