Israel News

By inviting the president of Israel and the head of the Palestinian Authority to his Vatican home for a “prayer for peace,” Pope Francis picks up where Secretary of State John Kerry left off—using moral suasion to bring the two famously recalcitrant sides together in the same room. But in this case, Francis is leaving out the Israeli leader who matters most.

Israel wouldn’t need the security barrier, if acts of incitement and terrorism against it stopped, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told Pope Francis on Monday at the start of their meeting at the Notre Dame Center in Jerusalem.

A negotiator said Monday he expects a Palestinian unity government to be announced later this week in what would be a first significant step toward ending the crippling rift between Hamas and Fatah.

Pope Francis’s reference to “the State of Palestine” in his speech Sunday morning in Bethlehem, and his unscripted pause at the security barrier, left official Israel cold, and was seized upon by Palestinian leaders as deeply symbolic in recognizing their national rights.

Pope Francis arrived on Sunday evening at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where he was scheduled to meet with the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I.

The Israel Police arrested 26 demonstrators overnight Saturday for causing a disturbance after they protested Pope Francis’ visit to Israel, at the King David’s Tomb complex in Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas continue to actively educate their children to ignore Israel’s existence, emphatically reject Israel’s right to exist, and anticipate its eventual destruction and replacement by “Palestine.”

Hamas officials met with EU representatives, sense that US is slowly ‘coming around’ on unity pact, deputy leader claims.

Pope Francis’ upcoming visit to Israel and the West Bank is being met with hopes he’ll help resolve problems that thus far have flummoxed kings, presidents and Nobel Prize laureates.

A group of Israeli Arab Christians led by a Greek Orthodox priest have roiled the Israeli Arab community by distancing themselves from their Arab identity and requesting that Christian Arabs be drafted into the Israeli army to show their support for the Jewish state.

The Palestinian leadership is unwilling to make compromises for peace, calling into the question the efficacy of diplomatic negotiations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published early Thursday.

US lawmakers overwhelmingly backed a $601 billion defense authorization bill that would almost double funding for the Israeli Iron Dome anti-missile program Thursday.

A group of 40 Bnei Menashe made Aliyah today from India, the first batch out of a total of 250 immigrants from the Lost Tribe that are slated to arrive over the coming month.

The failed attempt at regional peacemaking known as the Oslo Process has cost the state of Israel over 900 billion shekels — more than $250 billion — since 1993, and the costs keeps rising, according to a study by the Likud party’s Jewish Leadership faction, which is headed by MK Moshe Feiglin (Likud-Beytenu).

The Israeli police have put several right-wing Jewish ‘extremists’ on house arrest during Pope Francis’s upcoming visit, international media reports Wednesday, after the Vatican has expressed concerns about the pope’s safety in the wake of “price tag” attacks.

The construction of a resort in Galilee for Christian pilgrims may have inadvertently uncovered the hometown of the biblical Mary Magdalene.

The official Palestinian Authority Daily published an op-ed coinciding with Israel’s Independence Day last week calling Israel’s creation as “greatest crime known to humanity” according to Palestinian Media Watch.

A stone altar dating from the Iron Age was accidentally discovered near the remains of an ancient wall during a dig in Judea, according to the Unity Coalition for Israel.

An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Sunday decried an Israeli plan to build a synagogue near the Al-Aqsa Mosque and called on the international community to prevent any further desecration of the Temple Mount, according to the Tehran Times.

About a dozen Jewish men were removed by police while touring the Temple Mount after praying and singing Monday, according to The Jewish Daily Forward.