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Hamas have claimed responsibility for a bus-bombing in Tel Aviv earlier today. It is worth watching this video, which went out a few hours ago on Hamas’s ‘Al-Aqsa’ TV.  Over the presenter’s response are shown the first photographs of wounded Israelis being carried from the scene of the bus-bombing. The presenter is saying: ‘These are the scenes of the casualties. God willing, we will soon see black body bags. I pray to Allah the exalted that we see body bags in a short while. These are scenes of the Zionist casualties so far.’ Right now in these moments, the mosques in the Gaza Strip – their minarets are loudly sounding

A ceasefire is expected in Gaza later this evening, but is yet to materialise. Unsurprisingly, agreement has been hard to reach. Indeed, it has become a tool of propaganda. Hamas was busily briefing the world’s media that the ceasefire had been agreed even as rockets struck Rishon LeZion in southern Israel at 16.22 (GMT), causing two light casualties. Israel, for its part, was clear that there would be no ceasfire while it was still under attack. It was hoped that the message had got through: the BBC reported that the guns, so to speak, fell silent shortly after 16.40 for more than half an hour. However, it was the triumph of

The Books Blog has an interview with Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Soyinka is worth listening to for his ambivalence towards nationalism, his tolerant secularism and his recollection of solitary confinement during Nigeria’s civil war in the 1960s. But his comments on Boko Haram, the radical Islamist group that is terrorising northern and central Nigeria, are worth quoting here on a weekend of bloodshed in the Middle East. ‘I look at Boko Haram not just as a terrorist group, but also as a criminal gang, and a bunch of psychopaths. You don’t enter into dialogue with drug lords and criminals. It

The papers and media are full of the news that Israel has killed a Hamas leader in the Gaza. Why did this happen? Where did it come from? Is it not yet another example of the blood-thirsty Zionists doing their worst? If you read most of the British media that may well be what you think. After all there has been barely any previous mention in the British papers of the massive escalation in rocket fire into Israel in the last month or the even swifter escalation this week. Certainly no British paper or broadcaster has come close to giving these attacks the front-page publicity they grant to Israel’s response

What a lot of things President Obama seems to have been holding back until after his re-election. Each day brings something new. There has been the news of an attack by Iran on a US drone in the Persian Gulf. Then there is the Petraeus affair – known about for months, but only leading to the CIA chief’s resignation immediately after Obama’s re-election. The Benghazi hearings are yet to come. And now another surprise. It transpires that the Iraqi government, a body which is only in power because of the sacrifice of thousands of American, British and other allied troops, is releasing from custody a senior Hezbollah terrorist who was

The same problem keeps occurring for the megaphones of Iranian propaganda in the West: they keep being let down by their own side.  Every time another op-ed appears in the Guardian or Nation arguing that Iran isn’t seeking a nuclear device (and even if was it would never use it, and even though it doesn’t want a nuke and wouldn’t use it if it did, it does still at least have the ‘right’ to one) another Iranian official or one of their proxies lets slip the truth. The latest person to let the side down is the Hezbollah MP Walid Sakariya.  The MP for the Iranian Revolutionary government’s party in

There was an element of bafflement in the early BBC coverage this morning of the welcome news that police have identified and surrounded the suspected killer of seven people, including Jewish children, in Toulouse. To some people’s surprise, the BBC correspondent remarked in the early reports, the suspect turned out to be a Muslim, Mohammed Merah. So the entire tone of the Corporation’s coverage of the killings turns out to have been misplaced. Ever since the dreadful news that a gunman had attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse after killing three French soldiers, the overriding assumption on the part of the Corporation was that, unless the killer was merely unhinged,

The wires are ablaze with the news that Syria’s deputy oil minister, Abdo Hussameldin, has switched sides to the country’s opposition. His is, after all, the most high-ranking defection so far, and he doesn’t have any kind words for his former employers. As he puts it in a video that has been posted on YouTube, the current regime are ‘not friends of the Syrian people but partners in the killing of the Syrian people’. We shouldn’t, however, get too excited just yet. This could be a significant moment, not least because it suggests that Assad’s hold over his own government is beginning to weaken. But it’s also worth remembering that

How go those talks with the Taliban in Doha? Quietly, that’s how — although there’s a report in yesterday’s The Hindu that could reveal some of what’s being said, and is worth the time reading because of it. According to the paper’s diplomatic sources, the Taliban want Mullah Mohammed Omar installed as ‘supreme religious and political leader’ of Afghanistan. And, yes, that is the Mullah Omar who sheltered Al Qaeda when he actually was in charge of Afghanistan, and whose policy agenda included the death penalty for those converting to another religion, as well as the general subjugation of women, gay people, individuality, etc. He’s currently wanted to the tune