Israel to attend truce talks, Gaza hunger crisis acute

The main UN aid agency operating in Gaza says acute malnutrition is accelerating in the north of the Palestinian enclave as Israel prepares to send a delegation to Qatar for new ceasefire talks on a hostage deal with Hamas. Read more

Hamas presses on with Gaza truce talks without Israel

Hamas and Egyptian mediators are pressing on with talks in Cairo on securing a ceasefire in Gaza, despite Israel’s decision not to send a delegation, as Washington pressed again for a truce, the release of hostages and a plan to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. Read more

Plan for one-month Gaza truce makes progress

Israel and Hamas have moved closer to an agreement on a 30-day ceasefire in Gaza when Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners would be released, sources tell Reuters, as Israel presses ahead with its assault on southern Gaza’s main city of Khan Younis. Read more

Qatar, France broker deal for aid, medication to Gaza

Qatar and France have brokered a deal with Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas to deliver urgent medication to some 45 Israeli hostages held by the group in Gaza in return for humanitarian and medical aid for the most vulnerable civilians. Read more

Egypt floats ambitious plan to end Israel-Hamas war

Egypt has put forward an ambitious, initial proposal to end the Israel-Hamas war with a ceasefire, a phased hostage release and the creation of a Palestinian government of experts. Read more

Mossad and Qatar officials meet as Israel bombards Gaza

As Israel’s bombardment of Gaza continues, it is showing the first signs of coming to the negotiating table since the collapse of last month’s truce. Read more

Third group of hostages freed, prisoners released in Israel-Hamas deal

Another 17 hostages, including a US girl, have been released by Hamas, while Palestinian women and children have been released from Israeli prisons. Read more

Israel approves partial prisoner swap, temporary ceasefire with Hamas

The Israeli Cabinet has approved a partial Qatari-brokered prisoner swap and temporary ceasefire in the early hours of Wednesday morning, paving the way for the first Israeli hostages to return home possibly as soon as Thursday. Read more

Mossad, CIA chiefs and Qatar PM ‘discuss hostage deal’

The CIA and Mossad chiefs have met with the Qatari prime minister in Doha to discuss the parameters of a deal for hostage releases and a pause in Hamas-Israel fighting in the Gaza Strip, a source briefed on the meeting has told Reuters. Read more

Biden speaks to freed American-Israeli hostages

U.S. President Joe Biden spoke by phone on Saturday with Judith and Natalie Raanan, freed the previous night from captivity in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Read more

Qatar wants to negotiate captured Israelis, jailed Palestinians swap

Qatari mediators have held urgent calls with Hamas to try to negotiate freedom for Israeli women and children seized by the militant group and held in Gaza in exchange for the release of 36 Palestinian women and children from Israel’s prisons, a source briefed on the talks says. Read more

Hamas offers quiet for open border crossings and Qatari cash

Hamas has offered to quiet down recent Palestinian riots along the Gaza border in exchange for Israel opening the border crossings with the Strip and a resumption of Qatari financial aid, the Tazpit Press Service has learned. Read more

Blowing the whistle on FIFA’s systemic antisemitism

The FIFA World Cup in Qatar has arguably become the most controversial to date, raising widespread indignation over myriad issues concerning its host, including Qatar’s decision to ban beer from stadiums and its mistreatment of the press, the LGBTQ+ community and migrant workers, 6,500 of whom have died since Qatar was awarded the Cup. Read more

The not so beautiful game

They call football the beautiful game – a game played with grace and beauty and elegance as if poetry itself has leapt from the pages and onto the playing fields where players move with the smoothness of a gentle breeze across vast desert sands…writes Justin Ambler. Read more

Own goals

Scoring an own goal can be a most embarrassing result in a soccer game, but it also has another connotation. Read more

15,000 Israelis in Qatar for the World Cup

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Qatar’s farcical World Cup begins

Even before the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar kicked off, the tournament already had a hero: the former captain of the Iranian national team, Ali Daei. Read more

Gaza terror organisations to respond to IDF’s operation in Jenin

The Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper reported Sunday that sources in the Gaza Strip say that Egypt and Qatar are acting as mediators and have stepped up efforts to obtain calm, especially in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem, following the operation in Jenin in which three Islamic Jihad operatives were eliminated by Israeli Special Forces as they were on their way to carry out a terror attack. Read more

Hamas demands to add its members to list of families supported by Qatari grants

The Lebanese Al-Akhbar newspaper, which has good sources in Hamas, reported Monday that Egypt is asking Hamas to wait for Israel’s response regarding the demands of terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip put forward regarding a possible prisoner exchange deal and parameters for the rehabilitation of the Gaza Strip. Read more

Hamas agrees to new mechanism for receiving Qatari money

A new agreement between Israel and Qatar will enable the entry of Qatari funds into the Gaza Strip as early as this weekend, Arab sources confirmed yesterday. Read more

Qatar offers Hamas-ruled Gaza $500 million to rebuild

Qatar’s foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, announced on Wednesday that the Gulf state would give $500 million to help rebuild the Gaza Strip after an 11-day conflict with Israel. Read more

How will we know who won the war?

Maybe one day, we will discover that the impetus for Hamas’s latest onslaught against Israel wasn’t the pending Israeli Supreme Court decision about whether or not to respect the property rights of Jewish landlords in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood.

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Qatari TV host claims Israelis stole from Dubai hotels

Israeli media picked up a story reported by a Qatari TV host last week, claiming that Israelis had been caught stealing from hotels in the United Arab Emirates. The unverified report was uploaded to YouTube and viewed more than 300,000 times. Read more

Gulf states reach deal to end blockade against Qatar

The Gulf states have reached an agreement to end the three-year-old boycott of Qatar, announced Kuwait’s foreign minister on Monday. Read more

Turkey’s bid to return to Ottoman-era glory endangers Israel and the region

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has high ambitions. He wants to take his country back to what he perceives as the glory days of the Ottoman Empire, but the leader, who has been described as “pugnacious” and has been at the pinnacle of power since 2002, appears to be leading the country down the wrong path as he quashes secularism, supports radical Islamism, suppresses democratic reforms and adopts a forceful foreign-policy approach that aims to assert Turkish hegemony in the region. Read more

Israelis welcome to attend 2022 World Cup, says Qatari official

Israelis will be allowed to attend the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary-general of the supreme committee, which is in charge of the tournament, told ESPN earlier this week. Read more

Lieberman’s sudden resignation exposes deep rift over Gaza strategy

For several weeks, Israel’s outgoing Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman had made his dissatisfaction with Israel’s approach to Hamas in Gaza public—very public. Read more

Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘existential threat’

On the evening of Monday, July 23, the parliamentary group of the British Labour Party held what Sky News called an “emotionally charged meeting,” during which they endorsed the definition of antisemitism used by hundreds of government departments, law-enforcement agencies, municipal authorities and community associations around the world…writes Ben Cohen/JNS. Read more

Say it loud, say it clear: no World Cup for Qatar…writes Ben Cohen/JNS.org

In a normal world, it wouldn’t be Israel that is the target of a campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. The tiny Gulf emirate of Qatar is a far better candidate. Read more

Allies and adversaries in the Middle East

Who are we at war with in the Middle East?…asks Ben Cohen/JNS.org Read more