Israel

Israel backtracked on Monday on a threat to bar foreign journalists from entering the country for 10 years if they board a new international aid flotilla that plans to challenge the Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.

While LulzSec continues its Operation Anti-Security campaign against the world, rival group Team Poison has issued a statement promising to unmask LulzSec's members.

The Israeli government insisted that the application, called ThirdIntifada, incited violence against Israel.

Palestinian officials say a high-profile meeting between the leaders of the rival Fatah and Hamas movements has been called off and postponed indefinitely.

The Mavi Marmara, the Turkish aid ship that clashed with Israeli soldiers on the way to Gaza last year triggering a diplomatic storm, has pulled out of a repeat voyage later this month, the Turkish charity that owns the ship said Friday.

Syrian troops trying to quash three months of protests are committing "alleged breaches of the most fundamental rights", while 1,100 unarmed civilians have been killed in the crackdown says a UN report.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has announced that Turkey will not close its doors to Syrians fleeing unrest in their country.

After last Sunday's protests in the Golan Heights, tensions are mounting between Syria and Israel. As the Israeli authorities, backed by the U.S., accused the demonstration of being an enterprise backed by the al-Assad regime, according to the Associated Press, a Syrian government newspaper warned on Tuesday that more Syrians and Palestinians plan to march to the Israeli border. In what seems like a propaganda attempt, the newspaper reportedly warned: "Israel the day will come when hundred...

Gunmen from a pro-Syrian Palestinian organization shot at people during a protest at a Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus on Monday, WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency, reported on Tuesday. A reported 14 people died in the attack.

The problems with intra-national conflicts are often that in order to fully understand the set of complex dynamics and circumstances that come into play, far information than what is reported in and provided by the mainstream media is needed. In Libya problems did not surface just three months ago and despite being crushed, opponents of the Gaddafi regime existed before the uprising so is it really justifiable for Mustapha Abdul Jalil, the former Gaddafi Justice Minister to now be the head of th...

On June 4 China made its first confirmed contact with the Libyan rebels. The meeting was held in Qatar between a Chinese diplomat and the leader of the rebel National Transitional Council and follows a spate of defections by high-profile figures of the Gaddafi regime, including senior oil official and former Prime Minister Shokri Ghanem.In Beijing, a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement said Beijing's ambassador to Qatar, Zhang Zhiliang, had met and "exchanged views on developments in Li...

The National Transitional Council in Libya is slowly trying to establish itself as the legitimate successor to Gaddafi. The West has helped the rebel movement by widely promoting it and calling for countries throughout the world to officially back the new regime. However while the U.S , the U.K, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Canada have officially recognised the political organisation as the new legitimate representative body of the Libyan people, countries in Africa and in the Middle East ...

Libya's official opposition movement, the Transitional National Council (TNC), was formed rapidly as it was officially established only a week after the initial uprising began in Benghazi. The group is headed by Mustafa Abdul Jalil. The council was created to provide a structural and organised base for the rebel movement on the ground. However most of its most important positions are filled with regime defectors, not by people from the opposition.

Bernard Henri Levy announced that he delivered a message on Thursday from Libyan rebel leaders to Israel's Prime Minister, saying they would seek diplomatic ties with the country if they came to power.

As the news that 270 people went missing after a fishing boat carrying migrants from Libya to Italy broke down just off the Tunisian coast came , French writer Bernard Henri Levy announced he delivered a message on Thursday from Libyan rebel leaders to Israel's premier saying they would seek diplomatic ties with Israel if they came to power.

After bilateral talks and a much talked about barbecue, both held at Ten Downing Street, Barack Obama continued his three-day state visit to the United Kingdom with a joint press conference where he and British Prime Minister David Cameron answered questions posed by the press.

After Obama's Middle East speech last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swiftly drafted an official statement that was a first response to the U.S. President's demand to consider the 1967 border proposal as a starting point for negotiation. The tone was clear and firm, with Mr Netanyahu insisting on a common point Israel shares with the U.S.: national security is what is primordially leading the country's foreign policy.

The 1967 proposal has frequently been used in the last few years by the American diplomatic corps when referring to a potential solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was first publicly suggested in 2010, during a visit in Bahrain when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let slip that "we believe that the 1967 borders, with swaps, should be the focus of the negotiations over borders." At that time however the Obama’s administration believed that it was possible to reconcile t...

Obama's speech was of broad scope, with the US leader tackling different issues in different countries while using this as an opportunity to give the US response to the Middle East uprisings and regime changes. He pledged international economic support for countries undergoing democratic change, notably Egypt and Tunisia and warned Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to lead transition in his country, or to "get out of the way".

US President Barack Obama’s discourse, yesterday marked a “new chapter" in diplomacy after the Arab Spring uprisings, the leader explained. Talking from the state department, shifting from a military to a diplomatic emphasis, Mr Obama insisted on the interrelated nature of the US-Middle East relationship: “ though these countries may be a great distance from our shores, we know that our own future is bound to this region by the forces of economics and security; history and faith”, he said.

In comparison to other regions in the world, the Middle East attracts a relatively large part of US foreign policy time and has often presented it with its most enduring challenges. In the last decades, protecting the US interests within the region has become a complicated tasks as America has had to deal with the rise of Iran as a regional and influential power in the region and its illegal nuclear activities, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and his regime, invade Afghanistan, try to fight...

The conflict has gone on for over a hundred years and it is 44 years since the Middle East war of June 1967, over this time there have been many peace plans and many negotiations. If some of these have been successful, including those between Egypt and Israel and Israel and Jordan, a settlement has still not been reached in the core conflict. Looking back at a history of negotiations, the results derived from the different signed treaties are more confusing than encouraging. With the recent appe...

Following conflict that is more than a hundred years old, and 44 years since the Middle East war of June 1967, there have been many peace plans and many negotiations.If some of these have been successful, including those between Egypt and Israel and Israel and Jordan, a settlement has still not been reached in the core conflict. Looking back at a history of negotiations, the results derived from the different signed treaties are more confusing than encouraging.

US president Barack Obama has just called Israelis and Palestinians to go back to the negotiating table, but with past peace processes seen as fragile and not very efficient, the several Israeli-Palestinian talks and deals have become renowned for their longevity and chronic inability to find a way to end the conflict.

As talks between Israel and Palestine have been frozen since last year because of a dispute over settlements, Barack Obama said the US and Jordan both wanted Israelis and Palestinians to go back to the negotiating table, adding that it was "more vital than ever" for Israelis and Palestinians to restart negotiations on a peace deal.

The International Criminal Court chief prosecutor has today announced he is seeking the arrest of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and two others for crimes against humanity.

Vittorio Arrigoni, a 36 year old Italian pro-Palestinian activist, has been found murdered in the Gaza Strip.

At the Arab Summit in Doha, Qatar, on Monday, 28 March, 2009, Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi grabbed a microphone as the conference was about to begin and denounced King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia as a "British product and American ally."

Forget Britain's "Special Relationship" with America, largely a mirage of the Foreign Office and its existence unknown to most Americans. Even as World War II was ending, the cracks in the relationship between Britain and the United States were becoming ever more obvious to contemporaries and for more recent generations can be studied by reading books, both military and political, such as Armageddon and Nemesis by Max Hastings.

Libya appears to be in, or at least on the verge of, a civil war between Colonel Gaddafi loyalists and armed rebels who just a few weeks ago were merely anti-government protestors.