'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

On the killing of Osama Bin Laden

In the wee hours of this morning, Pakistan time, a U.S. Special Forces team entered Pakistan in helicopters and flew to a compound in Abbotabad where they found someone reported...

Quick notes on Fateh-Hamas reconciliation of April 27

As I tweeted yesterday, the reconciliation announced in Cairo yesterday-- which still needs a lot of fleshing out-- is the second great result of the Egyptian people's historic overthrow of...

M. Paraipan: Another informative Hamas-leader interview

Following up on the interview she conducted with Hamas Secretary-General Khaled Meshaal in Damascus in early November, Romanian researcher Manuela Paraipan conducted another one in Beirut recently with Hamas's representative...

Robinson and Brahimi: Wrong on Hamas and women

Mary Robinson and Lakhdar Brahimi have a piece in HuffPo today in which they argue, probably correctly, that it is Gaza's women and children who are paying the highest price...

Revealing interview with Khaled Meshaal

The enterprising, Bucharest-based researcher Manuela Paraipan published an interesting, revealing interview with Khaled Meshaal in Open Democracy last week. I'm sorry I don't have time to analyze it very thoroughly...

U.S. supports Taliban talks; Still opposing Hamas??

So here are Sec. of State Hillary Clinton and SecDef Bob Gates now saying they support-- and are giving active support to-- the Afghan government's initiative to negotiate with the...

Haaretz's Burston on Hamas's resilience, smarts

Here is a must-read from Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston. He writes about Hamas: Never has Israel had an enemy so perfectly attuned to the Jewish state's weaknesses, so impervious to...

Yezid Sayigh's paper on good governance in Gaza

I only just discovered that Yezid Sayigh's paper on the unexpectedly (for many westerners) good quality of Hamas's governance of Gaza is now up on the website of Brandeis University's...

A great resource on the Hamas women

Kudos to Conflicts Forum, which a few months ago published (PDF) a very informative study by the Hebron-area journalist and researcher Khaled Amayreh on the role of women in Hamas....

How to end the siege of Gaza

I've been thinking through some of the challenges any Israeli government would face as it considers ending its four-year-long siege of Gaza. (And that, it is becoming increasingly clear, is...

More questions about Mossad's Dubai debacle

Israeli military analyst Ronen Bergman had an interesting contribution in yesterday's WSJ about the almost-certainly-Mossad killing of Hamas operative Muhammad al-Mabhuh in Dubai last month. (HT: Phil Weiss.) It's true,...