Israeli PM Netanyahu makes surprise trip to Oman – which has no diplomatic relations with Jewish state

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the Jewish state Friday after a surprise -- and rare -- official visit to the Gulf state of Oman.

Netanyahu’s office said in a statement the prime minister was invited by Oman’s Sultan Qaboos bin Said after lengthy communications between the two nations.

Israel and Oman do not have diplomatic relations. Friday’s meeting was the first of its kind between leaders of the two countries since 1996.

“The visit is a significant step in implementing the policy that is designed to strengthen ties with the countries of the region while leveraging Israel’s advantages in security, technology, and the economy,” the statement said.

Netanyahu met with Oman's Sultan Qaboos bin Said during the surprise and rare visit to the majority Muslim nation. (Israel Prime Minister's Office)

In a joint statement, the two leaders said the two sides “discussed ways to advance the Middle East peace process and discussed a number of issues of mutual interest to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East.”

Netanyahu was accompanied on the surprise trip by his wife, Sara.

The last official visit between the two nations was in 1996 when then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres visited Oman and Qatar and opened Israel Trade Representations in both Gulf states. Before that, Peres’ predecessor Yitzhak Rabin, was the first to visit in 1994.

The last meeting between leaders of the two nations was in 1996 when then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres visited Oman and Qatar. (Israel Prime Minister's Office)

According to The Jerusalem Post, Netanyahu hinted at the trip on Thursday when he spoke at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in Tel Aviv.

“We always thought that if we solved the Palestinian problem it would open up the doors to peace with the broader Arab world. And that's certainly true if you could do it. But it may mean that equally true and perhaps even truer is that if you open up to the Arab world and you normalize relations with them it will open the door for an eventual reconciliation and peace with the Palestinians,” Netanyahu said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Obama Administration Sabotaged Anti-Hezbollah Task Force to Help Secure Iran Nuke Deal, Report Says

The Obama administration gave a free pass to Hezbollah’s drug-trafficking and money-laundering operations — some of which were unfolding inside the U.S. — to help ensure the Iran nuclear deal would stay on track, according to a bombshell exposé in Politico Sunday.

An elaborate campaign led by the Drug Enforcement Administration, known as Project Cassandra, reportedly targeted the Lebanese militant group’s criminal activities. But by tossing a string of roadblocks holding back the project, Obama administration officials helped allow the 35-year-old anti-Israel criminal enterprise to evolve into a major global security threat bankrolling terrorist and military operations, the report added.

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” David Asher, who helped establish Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst in 2008, told Politico. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

When Project Cassandra leaders, who were working out of a DEA’s Counter facility in Chantilly, Virginia, sought an OK for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, Justice and Treasury Department officials delayed, hindered or rejected their requests, according to Politico.


The red tape halted Project Cassandra’s efforts to curtail top Hezbollah operatives, including one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers who was also supplying conventional and chemical weapons used by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against his own citizens. That operative's code name: the “Ghost.”

Former Obama administration officials told Politico anonymously that their decisions were guided by improving relations with Iran, stalling its nuclear weapons program and freeing four Americans prisoners held by the country. They also denied they “derailed” actions against Hezbollah out of politics.

“There has been a consistent pattern of actions taken against Hezbollah, both through tough sanctions and law enforcement actions before and after the Iran deal,” Kevin Lewis who worked at both the White House and Justice Department during the Obama administration, responded.

Asher said the closer the U.S. got to finalizing the Iran nuclear deal, the more difficult it was to conduct Hezbollah investigations. After President Obama announced the deal in January 2016, Project Cassandra officials were transferred to other assignments.

“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher 49, who speaks fluent Japanese and earned his Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford University, told Politico. “So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”

Hezbollah was formed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 1982 to fight Israel’s invasion of Beirut. Under the leadership of Hassan Nasrallah, who took over in 1992 after his predecessor, Abbas Mussawi, was killed in an Israeli airstrike, the group moved from seeking to implement an Iranian-style Islamic republic in Lebanon to focusing on fighting Israel and integration into Lebanon’s sectarian-based politics.

Nasrallah, now 57, has played a key role in ending a feud among Shiites, focusing attention toward fighting Israel and later expanding the group’s regional reach.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

3 Israelis Dead In West Bank Stabbing Attack

Two Israelis were reportedly killed and one wounded in a stabbing attack in a West Bank settlement north of Ramallah.

Two men, in their 40s and 60s, and a woman in her 40s reportedly died of their wounds, while a woman in her 60s was seriously injured in the stabbing attack in the Halamish settlement, according to The Times of Israel.

The attacker was reportedly shot, according to Israeli media reports.




The attack follows clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces over the Israeli government’s decision to keep in place indefinitely metal detectors at the entrance to the Temple Mount.

Three Palestinians were reportedly killed Friday in clashes between rioters and police in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Some 42 people were wounded in clashes Thursday night between security forces and Palestinian protesters, who rioted during rallies against the introduction of metal detectors last week, Army Radio reported.

The metal detectors were placed at the entrance to the Temple Mount compound, which contains the Haram al Sharif area that is holy to Muslims, after three Arab-Israeli terrorists killed two police officers near the mosque on July 14. The gunmen were shot dead by troops who pursued them.

Palestinian Top Official Agreed Western Wall Belong To Israel But Lay Claims Temple Mount

Jibril Rajoub, a top Palestinian official, reportedly conceded that the Western Wall should remain under Israeli sovereignty — but insisted the Temple Mount belongs to the Palestinians. . “We understand that the wall … is sacred to the Jews and ultimately it has to remain under Jewish sovereignty,” Rajoub said, according to Haaretz.

But Rajoub linked Jewish sovereignty over the Western Wall to Muslim control of the Temple Mount. “

The Temple Mount is ours, not yours, and I think you should stop talking as if it’s yours,” he said.












Rajoub said any attempt to disturb the status quo on the Tempble mount would “create an explosion.”

The ally of Mahmoud Abbas said the Palestinians were hopeful that President Trump can break the logjam and bring peace.

“I call on Israelis: Guys, it’s time to draw the correct conclusions, let’s do business,” Rajoub added.

SOURCE: GLOBAL NEWS

Why Obama Voted To Abstain From The UN Resolution Demanding An end To Israel Settlement

President Barack Obama has decided to go out with a bang: In a stunning diplomatic rebuke of Israel, the United States on Friday abstained on a controversial United Nations Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory, allowing it to easily pass.





By abstaining — instead of vetoing the resolution, as the United States has reliably done to similar measures for decades — the Obama administration allowed the highly symbolic measure to make it through the chamber.

It was the first time in nearly 40 years that the Security Council has passed a resolution critical of Israeli settlements. It was also a firm rebuke of both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had strongly argued against it, and President-elect Donald Trump, who had taken the highly unprecedented move of weighing in Thursday and pressing for the measure to be vetoed.

The measure demands that Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem” and declares that the establishment of settlements by Israel has “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.”


This is far stronger language than the United States has ever officially used to describe Israeli settlement activity before. Although the standard US position has for three decades been that such settlements, which are built on land intended to be part of a future Palestinian state, are “obstacles to peace,” the United States has always stopped short of describing them as “illegal” under international law.Javier Zarracina/Vox

The Obama administration’s stunning vote was thus a dramatic shift in longstanding US policy. And it was no accident.

The move was Obama’s parting shot at Netanyahu, with whom Obama repeatedly clashed throughout his tenure. As my colleague Zeeshan Aleem writes, although the Obama administration gave Israel a bigger military aid package than any US president in history, and has vetoed past UN condemnations of settlements, Obama had a “tense and at times outright hostile relationship with the right-wing Netanyahu.” Among other things, they clashed over Israeli settlement expansion and the terms of the controversial Iran nuclear deal.


But Obama’s parting shot was also aimed at Trump, who has indicated he wants to take a much stronger pro-Israel stance. For instance, he has said he wants to move the US embassy to Jerusalem: a step that, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp explains, “every US governmenthas refrained from doing because the future of the disputed city is meant to be resolved as part of direct talks between the two sides for a final status peace deal.”

And Trump’s newly named ambassador to Israel, David Friedman — who has been a personal friend of Trump’s for about 15 years — is staunchly pro-settlement.

Indeed, it seems that an unprecedented intervention by Trump himself — in the form of a personal phone call to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — is the primary reason why Egypt, which had initially sponsored the UN measure, decided on Thursday to delay the vote indefinitely.

Mere hours before the vote was scheduled to take place, Trump issued a statement on Facebookcalling for the US to veto the measure. Shortly after, Egypt announced it would be delaying the vote. Trump spokesman Sean Spicer later confirmed that Trump had indeed spoken directly with both Sisi and Netanyahu about the proposed Security Council action. Friday’s resolution was sponsored by New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela, and Senegal — not Egypt.

It may very well have been this stunning intervention by Trump, directly meddling in a major US foreign policy decision before he has even taken office, that ultimately pushed Obama to take the dramatic step of abstaining on Friday’s vote.

Shortly after the UN measure passed on Friday, Trump reacted on Twitter by suggesting he intends to take a stronger line on defending Israel at the UN when he takes office: