Middle Orient

Israel’s prime minister on Monday announced plans to release 250 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails and promised to improve life in the West Bank in an attempt to boost Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas after the militant group Hamas’ takeover in Gaza.

DUBAI: A man described as a leader of al-Qaeda’s wing in Egypt called for attacks on Israeli and Western targets in the Arab world’s most populous country in support of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

A nuclear engineer at Egypt’s state-run Atomic Energy Agency was convicted by an Egyptian court of spying for Israel on Monday and sentenced to life in prison.

European Parliament (EP) President Hans-Gert Poettering said Friday (June 22nd) that the EU remains committed to resolving the case of six medics – five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who has been granted Bulgarian citizenship – who face death sentences in Libya for allegedly infecting hundreds of children with …

Norman Podhoretz, Editor-at-Large of Commentary Magazine, published an essay in the June 2007 issue of Commentary Magazine and republished it in the Wall Street Journal on May 30, 2007 (“The Case for Bombing Iran”), in which he declared his fervent prayer that President George W. Bush would choose to bomb …

The United States dismissed on Sunday the idea of a partial suspension of uranium enrichment by Iran, saying that Washington and its allies still insisted on a full suspension.

A ROYAL NAVY helicopter that crashed in flames in Basra last year, killing all five on board, was shot down by a sophisticated surface-to-air missile supplied to Iraqi militants by Iran, according to US officials.

Iran played a “big role” in Hamas’s seizure of Gaza from Palestinian security forces earlier this month, Palestinian intelligence chief Tawfiq al-Tirawi charged on Sunday.

A 35-year-old Iraqi journalist was shot to death Sunday on her way home from work in Mosul, officials said, the second female journalist to be killed in the northern city this month.

Saddam Hussein’s cousin and two other former regime officials were convicted Sunday of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to hang for the brutal crackdown that killed up to 180,000 Kurdish civilians and guerrillas two decades ago.