Middle Orient

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Tuesday warned Israel of a “great surprise” in the event of another war between the Lebanese guerrilla group and the Jewish state.

Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, has called for a summit of the nation’s main political factions in an attempt to break Iraq’s political paralysis. 

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas plans to hold legislative and presidential elections within six months, PA officials in Ramallah said Sunday.

  The Baghdad government plans to send 6,000 Kurdish soldiers — known as peshmerga — to help secure oil and electricity installations in the multiethnic region of Kirkuk.

Turkey and Iraq agreed to try to end the presence of a Kurdish rebel group in Iraq, Turkey’s prime minister told a news conference Tuesday, while four more US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq as US troop levels reached an all-time high of about 162,000. “We …

President Mahmoud Abbas promised Palestinians on Tuesday their lives would improve as a result of his talks this week with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. “Many issues which affect the Palestinians in their day-to- day lives will be resolved,” Abbas told Voice of Palestine radio in his first public comments …

Ehud Olmert on Monday became the first Israeli prime minister to visit a Palestinian town since the outbreak of fighting seven years ago, meeting under heavy guard with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to talk about the creation of a Palestinian state.

A Christian opposition candidate narrowly won a by-election to Lebanon’s parliament in a result that seemed set to further complicate a 9-month-old political crisis.  In the latest showdown between Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s Western-backed government and its opponents, tens of thousands of Lebanese voted in by-elections on Sunday triggered by …

The June split in Palestine and the subsequent hostile take over that occurred in the Gaza strip was a predictable and expected outcome if you were following recent events in the region. It seems as though efforts to sabotage the nascent alliance between Fatah and Hamas were rearing their ugly …

Former chief of the Turkish General Staff General Hilmi Ozkok said on Wednesday (August 1st) that any decision on launching military operations in northern Iraq depends on the government.