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The Obama administration accused Israel on Thursday of failing to do all it can to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza during cross-border attacks. Noting the deaths a day earlier of four boys who were killed on a Gaza beach by an Israeli strike, the State Department said the high civilian death toll in Gaza has been "heartbreaking." Three more children were killed in Gaza on Thursday. Still, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki also criticized Hamas militants in Gaza who continue to fire rockets and mortars into Israel, prolonging the latest round of violence in the Mideast that has so far...

Mosul (Agenzia Fides) - The last Christian families still present in Mosul are leaving the city and are heading towards Erbil, Dohuk and other areas of Iraqi Kurdistan which are considered safer. This is confirmed by sources of the local Chaldean community to Fides Agency. The new exodus has accelerated in the past two days, after Sunni insurgents and militants of the Islamic Caliphate began to mark with letters of recognition the homes of Christians and Shiites. As reported by the website www.Ankawa.com, the evacuation of the last Christians is also due to the intensification of the bombing carried out...

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has finally broken his silence, using his first statement since being released from the Taliban to thank President Barack Obama for his support. "Sergeant Bergdahl is deeply grateful to President Obama for saving his life," said Bergdahl's new attorney Eugene Fidell. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Fidell said the former prisoner of war had authorized him to make that statement on his behalf. The exchange of Bergdahl for five Taliban prisoners in U.S. custody has been controversial in part because several members of the Bergdahl's former unit have called him a deserter. They say he...

In a special interview on CNN Wednesday night, Economics Minister Naftali Bennett said that incidents such as the killing of four children on a Gaza beach earlier Wednesday were entirely the fault of Hamas – and were no accident. “I think it is terrible that Hamas is butchering its own children like this,” Bennett told senior CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer. “I would never take my children and place them next to rocket missile launchers,” knowing that it was likely to be targeted by the IDF, he said. “Hamas is conducting massive self-genocide, taking women and children and placing them next...

Hamas threatened Israel on Thursday evening and warned that it will pay a "high price" for launching a ground assault on Gaza. "The start of the Israeli ground attack on Gaza is a dangerous step, the consequences of which have not been calculated," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement quoted by AFP. "Israel will pay a high price and Hamas is ready for the confrontation," he declared. "With this action the Israeli government seeks to restore the morale of its soldiers and the morale of its army leadership - a leadership that is collapsing because of the qualitative...

The Prime Minister's Office has issued a statement that says the IDF has embarked on a ground assault into Gaza against Hamas's tunnels. The operation is deemed as "limited" and will probably not go further than two or three kilometers into Gaza's territory. This is deemed to be deep enough in enemy land to find the openings into Hamas's attack tunnels, like the one that was used in Thursday morning's infiltration into Israel by 13 terrorists. Egypt, meanwhile, has issued a statement saying that Hamas is to blame for the possible deaths of hundreds of Gazan civilians. The statement appears...

IDF fears that, without Hamas, Gaza could descend into a Somalia-like situation, in which dozens of gangs or clans would take over various parts of the strip. The next 48 hours in the Gaza Strip will likely bring more of the same: Israeli air strikes, murmurs about a limited Israel Defense Forces ground operation and continued rocket fire from the Strip to central and southern Israel. But there is also a slim chance of reaching a cease–fire agreement. Contacts aimed at achieving this are ongoing on two different fronts: one Egyptian, and the other Qatari-Turkish. The Palestinian Authority is maneuvering...

The Middle East is falling apart, according to the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s official daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida—all because of an elaborate conspiracy on the part of the US to stoke conflict in Gaza, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. “After the coffins of US soldiers returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, and before that, from Lebanon, [the US] adopted a new method [to protect US interests]: exploitation and creation of Islamic, Christian and Jewish religious extremism, in order to fight [Arabs] with it [this method] rather than with its own soldiers,” the article claims, in a translation provided by Palestinian Media Watch. “Taking a...

Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region has begun to pump oil from Kirkuk fields previously controlled by Iraq’s central government into the pipeline system that runs in its own territory, a senior Iraqi oil official said on July 17. Kirkuk lies on the disputed boundary between the northern Kurdish region and the rest of Iraq and is at the heart of a long-running dispute between Baghdad and Arbil, the Kurdish regional capital, over territory and natural resources. Kurdish forces took control of production facilities at the Kirkuk and Bai Hassan northern fields on July 11, exploiting a power vacuum created by an...

The Pentagon recently notified members of Congress that it intends to transfer six low-level detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Uruguay soon, including a Syrian man who is legally challenging the manner in which the military force-feeds some prisoners, U.S. officials said Wednesday. The men — four Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian — are among the more than 70 detainees who have long been cleared for release from the U.S. detention facility because they are not deemed an ongoing threat. The move would mark a significant step in the Obama administration’s long-stymied quest to shut down Guantanamo Bay, where...

Between the fall of the Jewish Commonwealth to the Romans in the first century A.D. and the founding of Israel in 1948, Jews were remarkably easy to kill. Not anymore. Today, thanks to an innovative missile-defense system called Iron Dome (in Hebrew Kipat Barzel), it’s harder than ever. Yet when it was first proposed, many Israeli defense experts (and one way or another most Israelis consider themselves defense experts) were reluctant to support the idea of a defensive response to rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon. Throughout the history of warfare there has been conflict between those who believe in...

Introduction The current Gaza conflict, which broke out following a deliberate escalation by Hamas when it fired dozens of rockets into Israeli cities over a wide radius (including Beersheba, Rehovot, and Ashdod and later Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa) raises questions about the reasons for this rocket offensive by Hamas. Why is it that, on July 7, 2014, Hamas broadened the scope of the battle beyond the exchanges of fire with Israel that had occurred previously, and fired rockets deeper into Israel than it had since Operation Pillar of Defense in late 2012? Apparently, Hamas' decision to launch a rocket...

Backgrounder: The Students for Justice in PalestinePosted By Lee Kaplan On July 17, 2014 @ 12:35 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 4 Comments The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) today exists as a consortium of campus “clubs” throughout the American and Canadian college systems which work to oppose the existence of Israel and to promote Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the Jewish state. There are at least 80 chapters of these clubs on campuses throughout the US and Canada. The SJP goes under other assorted names on some campuses. Names such as Palestine Solidarity Committee or Students for...

Obama Administration Suppresses Talk of Muslim Persecution of ChristiansPosted By Raymond Ibrahim On July 17, 2014 @ 12:35 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 1 Comment Originally published by the Gatestone Institute.Along with an especially egregious list of atrocities committed against Christian minorities throughout the Islamic world, March also saw some callous indifference or worse from the U.S. government.President Barack Hussein Obama was criticized by human rights activists for not addressing the plight of Christians and other minorities during his talks with leaders in Saudi Arabia, where Christianity is banned.According to the Washington-based International Christian Concern (ICC) advocacy group, Obama did not “publicly...

European Union (EU) leaders on Wednesday condemned the firing of rockets into Israel while urging the Israel to “act proportionately” and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire, AFP reports. Voicing “great concern” over continued violence in Israel and Gaza, EU leaders said the bloc “condemns the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel and the indiscriminate targeting of civilians.” “Israel has the right to protect its population (but) in doing so it must act proportionately and ensure the protection of civilians at all times,” a European Union statement added. …

Defense lawyers in the Jesse Ventura defamation case rolled out a parade of witnesses Wednesday claiming Ventura got punched out in a California bar. That’s the claim in the best-selling war memoir “American Sniper” by the deceased author Chris Kyle. It’s about to be made into a movie. But the bar fight is a claim Ventura says never happened. For the last two days, Navy SEALs have claimed in court that they saw one part or another of the bar fight. Ventura, described in the book as “scruff face,” is accused of shooting off his mouth about the war and...

Hamas agreed on Wednesday night to a temporary humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, but not before firing another salvo of rockets towards Israel. "The group agrees to a ceasefire for five hours," starting from 10:00 a.m. local time Thursday, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement quoted by the AFP news agency. "The Palestinian factions agreed to accept the offer from the United Nations for a cooling-down on the ground for five hours starting from 10 in the morning," he told the news agency. Shortly before 2:00 a.m. Thursday morning, however, sirens were heard in the Eshkol region, Hof...

What’s it going to take until we can talk frankly about the enemy?We are constantly being told by jihadists that they are waging holy war in the cause of Islam, while their operatives here in the West (CAIR, ISNA, ICNA, MSA, etc.) insist that it has nothing to do with Islam. And our political and media elites do their bidding, shutting up and shutting down any discussion of jihadic doctrine, despite the reality.How many people have to be slaughtered before it’s too late?It’s not islamophobia, it’s islamorealism. Our AFDI ad, which ran in NYC, below: “Police: Al Qaeda Magazine Suggesting...

IRBIL, Iraq — The sectarian Shiite militias that the government in Baghdad has dispatched to fill the void created by the collapse of the Iraqi army are proving ill-equipped for offensive operations intended to reverse gains by the radical Islamic State, Iraqi soldiers and military experts studying the current military situation have concluded. The inadequacy of the militias to turn the tide was demonstrated again on Wednesday six miles south of Tikrit, the central Iraqi city that Islamic State fighters seized June 11 and that Iraqi forces and Shiite fighters have been trying to reclaim for more than two weeks....

The president said the new sanctions against Russia -- which hit major Russian banks and lucrative energy and defense entities -- are in large part for allowing weapons to cross into Ukraine and other involvement in that country. Obama also said that Iran has made significant efforts to fulfill its promise to scale back its nuclear program -- including international inspections -- ahead of a July 20 deadline. But he said he will talk with Congress in the coming days about whether to extending the deadline, saying there are still “significant gaps.”