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But a Saudi government official told the BBC that in response to the Russian air strikes in Syria, it was stepping up its supply of weaponry to three anti-Assad rebel groups there.The official said the Free Syrian Army, Jaysh al-Fatah and Southern Front would get increased supplies of modern, high-powered weaponry, including guided anti-tank weapons.

The Russian air strikes had "weakened" IS, Syrian Army Chief of Staff Gen Ali Abdullah Ayoub said on Thursday, enabling the army to start a "big attack" to retake towns and villages.Heavy fighting was reported in areas of Idlib, Hama and Latakia provinces, where a coalition of rebels that includes the Nusra Front operates.Government-backed troops had moved into the key Ghab plain area, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

The Palestinian unity government formed last year in a bid to heal rifts between Hamas and president Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party resigned on Wednesday, an official said. According to AFP, an aide to president Mahmoud Abbas said that prime minister Rami Hamdallah “handed his resignation to Abbas and Abbas ordered him to form a new government.”

Discussions to form a new government would include consultations with the various Palestinian factions, including Hamas, he said.

Officials have said the planned dissolution of the government, made up of technocrats, had been under discussion for several months because of the cabinet’s inability to operate in the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have condemned the unilateral dissolution of the government, a decision they say they were not consulted over. “No one told us anything about any decision to change and no one consulted with us about any change in the unity government. Fateh acted on its own in all regards,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told AFP Wednesday. Khalid al-Batsh, a senior leader in Islamic Jihad, also condemned the “unilateral” move to dissolve the unity government. Before the official resignation, a PLO official said, “The government will continue to function until we have a new one. “I think what’s coming now is the formation of a government with politicians, not a government of technocrats.” Senior Hamas official Ziad al-Zaza meanwhile struck a conciliatory note, calling on Abbas “to form a unity government with all national and Islamic factions to face Israeli occupation.”

But the major change in relationships took place in 1967. Just take a look at USA aid to Israel. You can tell that right off. And in many other respects, it’s true, too. Similarly, the attitude towards Israel on the part of the intellectual community -- you know, media, commentary, journals, and so on -- that changed very sharply in 1967, from either lack of interest or sometimes even disdain, to almost passionate support. So what happened in 1967?

And Nasserite secular nationalism was considered a serious threat, because it was recognized that it might seek to take control of the immense resources of the region and use them for regional interest, rather than allow them to be centrally controlled and exploited by the United States and its allies. So that was a major issue.

While the U.S. was mired in Southeast Asia at the time -- it was right at the time, a little after the Cambodia invasion and everything was blowing up -- the U.S. couldn't do a thing about it. So, it asked Israel to mobilize its very substantial military forces and threaten Syria so that Syria would withdraw. Well, Israel did it. Syria withdrew. That was another gift to U.S. power and, in fact, U.S. aid to Israel shot up very sharply -- maybe quadrupled or something like that -- right at that time. Now at that time, that was the time when the so-called Nixon Doctrine was formulated.

Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi returned from his official visit to China and meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping. On Tuesday, the two heads of State signed a joint statement on bilateral relations and comprehensive strategic partnership. The agreement sets new trends in international diplomacy and relations. Egypt’s presidential spokesman, Ambassador Alaa Youssef commented on the Chinese – Egyptian agreement, saying that signing the statement elevated bilateral relations to a progressive level. The agreement encompasses politics, economy, trade and investment, military and security, culture and humanitarian issues, space sciences and technologies, as well as a number of regional and international issues.

After a document obtained by Al Jazeera revealed the Palestinian Authority (PA) has stalled the launch of a formal investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza, Palestinian legal and human rights experts remain dubious that the PA ever truly intended to join the International Criminal Court (ICC). In a confidential letter obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit, the ICC's top prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, said she "did not receive a positive confirmation" from PA Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki that the request submitted for an international investigation had the Palestinian government's approval. Palestinian officials have, on numerous occasions, threatened to head to the ICC to hold Israel accountable for possible war crimes and crimes against humanity. But their efforts so far, have proved fruitless. In July, a French lawyer filed a complaint with the court on behalf of the Palestinian minister of justice, accusing Israel of carrying out war crimes in the Gaza Strip. This came after a 2009 call for an ICC investigation into Israel's three-week military offensive in Gaza that was later dropped when the prosecutor said Palestine was not a court member. In August, Malki met with ICC officials to discuss the implications of ratifying the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the criminal court. "Everything that has happened...is clear evidence of war crimes committed by Israel, amounting to crimes against humanity," he told reporters in The Hague, referring to the recent 51-day Israeli military offensive on Gaza, which left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead. Six Israeli civilians were killed, along with 66 Israeli soldiers.

Two years ago, Palestine became recognised as a non-member observer state at the UN General Assembly. This made it eligible to join the ICC; however, to date, Palestinian officials have not signed the Rome Statute, even though almost 80 percent of Palestinians support going to the court. Senior Fatah official Mohammad Shtayyeh didn't say when the Palestinians would apply to the ICC, but said it would probably happen in another few months. "The indictment against Israel at the ICC and all the accompanying documents are ready," Shtayyeh told Al Jazeera. One of the remaining hurdles, Shtayyeh said, is getting one remaining Palestinian faction - Islamic Jihad - to sign an accession document before the Palestinians can present it. Hamas signed onto the proposal at the behest of the PA in August. "We're not in a situation of setting a deadline or making an ultimatum," he said. "We're following developments in the region and the world, and therefore, we'll wait for answers from the international community. But I believe that by November-December, the picture should be clearer."

In response to Al Jazeera's claims, the Palestinian Justice Minister Salim al-Saqqa said that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was serious about going to the ICC and was "awaiting national dialogue" to pursue it. "This issue is our number-one priority," he said. "It is still on the table awaiting a few legal and technical procedures. We have not missed our opportunity to head to the court." So far, the Palestinians have struggled to use the court to pursue their claims, with some attributing this to the PA's use of an ICC investigation as a political bargaining chip. "The PA can go to the ICC in one day," said Shawan Jabarin, the director of Ramallah-based human rights group al-Haq. "Abbas, who has been turned this into a political issue, is balking." Many factors are working against setting off a war crimes investigation at the ICC, not least the international community's apparent opposition to the move. "It is the PA's trump card because the Israelis and the Americans have said it is a red line," said Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

Hamas-affiliated parliament members in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday reactivated the coastal enclave's parliament, which had been suspended since a unity deal between Fatah and Hamas was agreed upon in April.The convening of the session, which was attended exclusively by Hamas legislators, represents a major eruption of tensions within the Palestinian coalition government and presents yet another hurdle for officials trying to hold the agreement together.Deputy speaker of the Gaza parliament Ahmad Bahar delivered a speech at the beginning of the session in which he warned of a possible "blowup" in the Gaza Strip as a result of the delay in reconstruction, the ongoing crippling Israeli siege, and the Palestinian Authority's failure to pay monthly salaries to civil servants employed under the former Hamas government."A blowup is at a distance of two-bows length or less if the international community does not take action to end the suffering of the people of Gaza," he said.

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi announced on Saturday that the French government of PM Francois Hollande has granted Egypt a 3.2 billion euro loan for deals about military equipment between the two nations. The development comes against the backdrop of an increasingly confident continental European, French – German-led policy that opposes primarily an US/UK driven policy of tension and terrorism in the MENA region and could signal a long-awaited departure from the destructive role France played in Libya.  French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian visited Egypt in February with other French officials to sign a deal on the sale of 24 Rafale fighter jets, a naval frigate and related military equipment, reports The Cairo Post.

Egypt has since also signed significant defense deals with Russia. Egypt’s Defense Minister Sedki Sobhi is currently in Russia to discuss further Russian – Egyptian defense cooperation in combating terrorism and the delivery of Russian MiG-35 jets to Egypt.

French arms sales to Egypt are not unusual. What, according to some analysts, could suggest the beginning of a French U-Turn with regards to the French role in North Africa and Libya is that the administration of Francois Hollande cannot other than be cognizant of the fact that the French jets and naval vessels will strengthen an Egypt that struggles with countering the aftershocks of the 2011 “Arab Spring” in Egypt, in Libya, as well as in Syria.

The Arab League announced that it would re-table a draft resolution at the UN Security Council on Monday, calling for an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian and other Arab territories including the occupied Syrian Golan and the Lebanese Sheba Farms. The Arab League’s draft resolution calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from all of the territories Israel occupied during the 1967 war. That is, Palestinian territories including East Jerusalem, the Israeli occupied Syrian Golan as well as the Israeli occupied, Lebanese Sheba Farms area in southeastern Lebanon.

The Arab League perceives the draft resolution as part of a policy based on the notion that a resolution of the Israel – Palestinian conflict only can be found within the framework of a comprehensive resolution that includes other issues which arose as a consequence to the 1967 war. In December 2014 the UN Security Council rejected a similar, Jordanian-sponsored draft resolution that called for a full Israeli withdrawal within two years. The resolution was endorsed by eight concurrent votes, falling one vote short of the minimum of nine votes. Had the resolution received the necessary nine votes, stated the U.S. State Department, the United States would have made use of its veto right at the Security Council. It were the victors of WWII who “endowed themselves” with the veto right, practically subjugating all other UN member States to the political will of the permanent UN Security Council members.

The rejection of the draft resolution, in December, prompted the President of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority to accede to some 20 international treaties, including the Rome Statute. On April 1, Palestine will become a member to the United Nations’s International Criminal Court (ICC). Neither the U.S., Russia, China or Israel have made their citizens subject to prosecution by the ICC.

Israel’s leaders vowed last week that Operation Protective Edge would deal Hamas a lethal blow. Instead, it has achieved the opposite effect. The continued pounding of Gaza by Israeli warplanes looking to cripple Hamas's ability to launch rockets against Israeli population centers — which has also destroyed large segments of Gaza’s fragile civilian infrastructure and claimed close to 200 lives — has breathed new life into the Islamist movement by restoring its preferred role at the forefront of Palestinian resistance to Israel. In doing so, however, Israel may simply have entrenched the status quo for the long term.  Hamas made clear in statements at the outset of the current exchange of fire that while it was ready to escalate if Israel did, it preferred to avoid a renewed military confrontation with Israel at the present momen

But far from removing the totality of Hamas’s rocket-launching capability, Operation Protective Edge has renewed Hamas’ claim to be the premier group resisting Israel. (The Palestinian Authority security forces had been widely derided in the West Bank for standing by — and even suppressing protests — during Israel’s recent crackdown there that killed at least five Palestinians.) Whatever else it has achieved, Israel’s offensive appears to have blocked the creation of a Palestinian unity government that would restore the PA in Gaza. Instead, it has restored the familiar division of the Palestinian Authority polity between Hamas control in Gaza and Fatah control of the West Bank.

Ali Beshr, Egypt’s Minister of Local Development during the presidency of the ousted Mohamed Morsi, has been detained since Thursday, reports The Cairo Post, quoting Muslim Brotherhood lawyer Abdul Meneim Abdul Maqsoud. For the first time since the ouster of Morsi, Egypt’s prosecutor may implicate the U.S. and EU/NATO member Norway in conspiracy as well as possible espionage, terrorism and high-treason.

Ali Beshr, Egypt’s Minister of Local Development during the presidency of the ousted Mohamed Morsi, has been detained since Thursday, reports The Cairo Post, quoting Muslim Brotherhood lawyer Abdul Meneim Abdul Maqsoud. For the first time since the ouster of Morsi, Egypt’s prosecutor may implicate the U.S. and EU/NATO member Norway in conspiracy as well as possible espionage, terrorism and high-treason.

Most of the leading members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a.k.a. Ikhwan, were captured shortly after the dispersal of the Rabaa al-Adweya and Nahda Square sit ins on August 14, 2014. Morsi and over thirty other leading Muslim Brotherhood members and as well as members of the Morsi administration are facing charges, including espionage, terrorism and treason, cooperation with Hamas and Hezbollah in the attempt to subvert Egypt’s security and integrity, as well as the passing on of information that is sensitive to Egypt’s national security to Qatar. Since the overthrow of the Morsi administration, following record demonstrations with an estimated 14 million people, Egypt has also accused Turkey of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. That includes allegations that Turkey’s intelligence service MIT, under Hakan Fidan, is behind the Muslim Brotherhoods Rabaa TV channel, based in Turkey.

Israel has banned Norwegian doctor and human rights activist Mads Gilbert from entering Gaza for life. Gilbert, a professor at the University Hospital of North Norway, where he has worked since 1976, earned international renown for his philanthropic work in late 2008, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, an attack that, according to Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, killed roughly 1,400 Gazans, including almost 800 civilians, 350 of whom were children. The aid worker, along with fellow Norwegian doctor Erik Fosse, decided to volunteer in Gaza as soon as he heard that bombing had started, on 27 December 2008. Thanks to diplomatic and economic support (in the sum of $1 million dollar of emergency funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the two physicians managed to arrive in the strip by 30 December.

The Israeli government prevented all international press from entering Gaza during Cast Lead (a documentary, The War Around Us, was made about the only two foreign reporters in the strip at the time), in what Gilbert called Israel’s insidious “PR plan.” The doctor, as one of the only international aid workers in Gaza, thus devoted considerable time to speaking with local Palestinian news outlets, some of whom were reporting on behalf of foreign networks including BBC, CNN, ABC, and Al Jazeera. BBC aired an interview with Gilbert, conducted in the hospital. The questions asked, and the answers garnered, were eerily similar to those he would give just five years later, during Operation Protective Edge. The interviewer began asking him to respond to Israel’s claims that it was not targeting civilians, that it was only attacking Hamas militants. Gilbert called the claim “an absolutely stupid statement” and explained that, among the hundreds of patients he had seen at that point, only two had been fighters. The “large majority” were women, children, and men civilians. “These numbers are contradictory to everything Israel says,” he reported.

The doctor directed one heart-wrenching passage to President Obama, writing “Mr Obama – do you have a heart? I invite you – spend one night – just one night – with us in Shifa. I am convinced, 100 per cent, it would change history. Nobody with a heart and power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.” Israel later attacked Shifa hospital. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) “strongly condemn[ed]” the incursion, saying it “demonstrate[d] how civilians in Gaza have nowhere safe to go.” MSF director Marie-Noëlle Rodrigue stated, in an official statement, “When the Israeli army orders civilians to evacuate their houses and their neighborhoods, where is there for them to go? Gazans have no freedom of movement and cannot take refuge outside Gaza. They are effectively trapped.” Shifa was one of the over 10 medical facilities Israel bombed in its 50-day offensive.

The Israeli government is holding closed-door meetings about receiving some 6,000 Jewish citizens who have been replaced due to the Ukrainian civil war, reports the Israeli Maariv newspaper. Meanwhile, western support for overtly National Socialist and Ultra Nationalist parties and militants in Ukraine continues. 

The cabinet of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secretly plans the construction of “refugee camps” to receive the “6,000 displaced” Ukrainian Jews, reports Maariv. The construction of refugee camps for the 6,000 Ukrainians is reportedly being planned under the supervision of Israel’s Minister of Economy, Naftali Bennett. Maariv didn’t specify where these 6,000 Ukrainians should be settled. The news comes as the death toll of a recent attack on a Jewish Synagogue in Jerusalem has risen to five and the eruption of a row between the Netayahu government and the Palestinian government under President Mahmoud Abbas. While Netanyahu blames Fatah and Hamas for terrorism and for the attack, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas responded by blaming Israel’s occupation of Palestine for causing conflict and for driving people into acts of terrorism. The rapid spread of ultra nationalism, overtly Nazi Parties and militia, and their rapid rise to power during the Western-backed “Euro-Maidan” protests in Kiev has resulted in pogroms and threats against Jews and Jewish communities throughout Ukraine with the exception of those areas in the rebelling Donbass region which are firmly under the control of the rebelling regional governments, as well as with the exception of Crimea, which acceded into the Russian Federation after a referendum in  Crimea on March 16, 2014.

Palestinians from the Gaza Strip have criticized an Israeli report on the country’s 2014 military operation against the besieged coastal enclave. The report was released by Israeli state comptroller Yosef Shapira on Tuesday. “I understand from the report that Gaza was merely the setting for an Israeli war game, with no objective but to destroy and murder indiscriminately,” said Basman Alashi, executive director of the El-Wafa Medical Rehabilitation and Specialized Surgery Hospital. The hospital, formerly located in the Shujaya neighborhood by the separation barrier with Israel east of Gaza City, was repeatedly shelled by Israeli forces during the 51-day offensive before it was evacuated under fire on July 17, 2014.

“The overall impression it leaves is this: ‘Netanyahu, You didn’t do a good job of destroying Gaza, do it better next time,’” Alashi said of the report. Others said the document contained useful information about Israel’s behavior during the offensive, even if its conclusions remained incomplete. “The report shows that Israel follows a systematic policy of humiliating Palestinians, especially through careless targeting of civilians,” said Ramy Abdu, founder and chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Abdu’s Geneva-based agency has conducted investigations of Israel’s military conduct, including an Oct. 30, 2014 report stating that its forces had “deliberately targeted locations with concentrations of civilians” during operations earlier that year. “What the report has failed to cover is to cite careless targeting of civilians as a consistent failure of the Israeli forces, with almost no serious actions to do something about it,” Abdu said in regard to the Israeli comptroller’s findings.

It also claimed the cabinet had not only failed to consider diplomatic alternatives to military action, but also to set any clear strategy concerning Gaza. Once the operation began, it said, Israeli forces largely failed to meet their objective of thwarting tunnels dug by Palestinian resistance groups, destroying only half of them over weeks of a bloody ground invasion that produced many casualties. The comptroller did not appear to consider the goals of an earlier military operation, launched by Israel in the West Bank on June 13, 2014. These goals were to weaken Hamas, obstruct an agreement by Hamas and Fatah to form a unity government across the West Bank and Gaza Strip and recover three young settlers captured by Palestinians.