UN aid workers on Thursday called for an urgent ceasefire in Gaza and warned that the violence is impeding with their ability to help the affected in the Palestinian enclave. Anne-Claire Dufay, the chief of UNICEF’s field office in Gaza, said that the renewed hostilities threatened the delivery of aid to several hundreds of thousands of children. “We urgently need …

On Thursday, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas spoke with exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal as renewed fighting continued in the Gaza Strip following the failure of the Egyptian-brokered truce deal. The two spoke in Doha, where Meshaal is currently operating from, and were hosted by the Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, an important supporter of Hamas, the QNA news …

Bombing Iraq, as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore indicates today, has become an American pastime.  (These days, you can’t be president without sending in the bombers and drones.)  So let’s try to get our heads around the latest U.S. air strikes in northern Iraq against the forces of the new “caliphate.”  It’s a campaign that President Obama …

On Wednesday, Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi said Israel was “blocking” all attempts to end the conflict in the Gaza Strip, a day after the temporary ceasefire collapsed in the Palestinian enclave. “Israel is blocking any kind of agreement leading to calm” in Gaza, Arabi told journalists. “The Arab League wants to reach a permanent truce as soon as possible”, …

  Even before starting work as chairman of a United Nations human rights commission investigating Israeli war crimes in Gaza, Canadian law professor William Schabas has been vilified as an apologist for Iran incapable of setting aside his perceived anti-Israel bias. Full page adverts have been taken out against him in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington …

The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, on Wednesday warned foreign airliners against flying to Tel Aviv, threatening to escalate the conflict with Israel and declaring that truce talks in Egypt were over. “We are warning international airlines and press them to stop flying into Ben Gurion airport from 6 am (0300 GMT) Thursday”, Abu Obeida, a spokesman …

Well-known Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim, known all over the Arab world for his nationalist writing, passed away on Tuesday after his battle with cancer. 75-year-old Qasim died in the Safed hospital in northern Israel, Issam Khuri, a family friend said, after suffering from liver cancer for the past three years. Qasim was best known for nationalist poetry in which he …

Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip killed 31 Palestinians and wounded 120 others on Wednesday, after the temporary ceasefire between Hamas and Israel had ended a day earlier. The infant son and wife of Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif were among those killed in an Israeli strike which leveled a six-story building in Gaza city, Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesman for …

US President Barack Obama on Wednesday called for a combined effort to get rid of the “cancer” of extremists in Syria and Iraq, after militants from the Islamic State murdered 40-year-old American journalist James Foley. Obama also said that the entire world was shocked by the beheading of Foley, which IS videotaped and put on the internet. “There has to …

On Tuesday, several thousands marched to the Pakistani parliament as a part of their bid to force Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to resign, using bolt cutters and a crane to break barricades of containers blocking the way in the capital city of Islamabad. Paramilitary forces and riot police tried to barricade the government and diplomatic zone before the march …