Tel Aviv

Turkey, under Mssrs Erdoğan and Davutoğlu, has always had to defend itself against Zionist aggression through peaceful, often pacifist, means. Erdoğan once politely ignored it when the then Israeli President Shimon Peres roared at him that: “Turks know best how to kill.”

The Israeli air force bombed 160 targets in the Gaza Strip overnight as it pressed a widescale campaign to stop volleys of Palestinian rocket fire, an army official said Wednesday.
      

Three of six Israelis held over the abduction and killing of a Palestinian teenager last week have confessed to the murder, a source close to the investigation said on July 6.
      

Israel launched a series of air strikes on Gaza early on July 7 to quell Hamas rocket fire, and the Islamist group's armed wing said seven of its gunmen were killed, making it the deadliest day for Hamas since a 2012 cross-border war with the Jewish state.
 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged his cabinet on Sunday to keep a cool head about how to handle growing tensions in and around the Gaza Strip.        

Seizing on the mayhem in Iraq, Israel's prime minister on June 29 called for the establishment of an independent Kurdistan as part of a broader alliance with moderate forces across the region, and asserted that Israel would have to maintain a long-term military presence in the West Bank to keep a jihadi juggernaut from powering its way to the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
     

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became angry because the main opposition leader had called the Middle East a quagmire. “That’s insulting,” the prime minister said. Before a court bans using the words “Middle East” and “quagmire” in the same sentence, this columnist volunteers to call the peaceful, wealthy, healthy and happy region as “the Eden of the Middle East.”

Israel said on June 15 Hamas militants had abducted three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank, warning of "serious consequences" as it pressed on with a search and detained dozens of Palestinians.

The two 16-year-olds and a third man aged 19 disappeared on June 12 night in the West Bank, where they were seminary students in a Jewish settlement.

Last week I was in Israel to attend the Herzliya Conference, a high level international security conference taking place annually in Tel Aviv. On the sidelines of the conference I had a conversation with Ehud Barak, former Prime Minister and Defence Minister of Israel. Since we met right after the Mosul assault, Iraq has been the center of gravity of our conversation.

Bulgaria could receive gas supplies from Israel using the transportation grid of Greece, Bulgarian Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski said while in Israel.

Business representatives of both Israel and Bulgaria declared their interest in energy cooperation at a joint conference on Monday evening.