By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 June 2025

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 June 2021

Members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, at a memorial in Gaza, 31 January 2017. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib, Flash90.
The May 2021 round of fighting in Gaza brought with it the upending of the unspoken understanding between Israel and Hamas and a level of intercommunal violence within Israel that has not been seen in quite some time. The scale of the rocket attacks on the Jewish state must also be counted among the unusual elements of this latest flare-up, with Iran clearly identifiable as the enabling state behind Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the two primary factions behind these attacks. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 27 May 2021

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system [left] activates over southern Israel against incoming HAMAS rockets [right], 14 May 2021
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 August 2020

Al-Naba 248
The Islamic State (IS) produced the 248th edition of Al-Naba, its newsletter, on 20 August. The front page was devoted to recent events in Yemen, which had not gone well for IS—although one could easily miss that fact when reading a story that a focuses almost entirely on enemy casualties and the failures of others. IS is, of course, not pleased about the Israeli normalisation of relations with the United Arab Emirates, but Al-Naba makes clear that it is more perturbed that Muslims should believe Turkey or Qatar are any better than the U.A.E., despite their different approach to Islamists. Al-Naba 248 documents IS’s continuing advances in Afghanistan—and, indeed, Iraq, Syria, Africa (the Sahel), and Egypt. There is also a report of insurgent activity in the Philippines. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 18 April 2019

Israeli opinion generally regards the country’s efforts to contain Iran, especially in Syria, as having been successful. In fact, the trendline runs the other way: Iran is constraining Israel, entrenching all around the Jewish state. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 December 2018

© AP Photo / Jim Hollander, Pool
Essay: “Zionism is Making Us Stupid”: The Russian Relationship with Israel from the Soviets to Putin Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 September 2018

The spokesman for the Islamic State (IS), Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, gave a short speech today, “The Muwahhidin’s Assault on the Tower of the Mushrikin” (The Monotheists’ Assault on the Tower of the Polytheists). Abu Hassan’s speech was further confirmation of IS’s responsibility for the terrorist attack in Iran on 22 September. IS has published an English-language transcript of this speech, which is reproduced below with some editions for transliteration. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 12, 2014

In a post yesterday I listed the operations Israel has so far carried out in Syria. Between 2007 and 2011, Israel eliminated several senior terrorists inside Syria and destroyed a nuclear-weapons facility. Since the war began in 2011, Israel has mostly carried out airstrikes in Syria to prevent Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) transferring advanced weaponry to the IRGC’s Lebanon-based branch, Hizballah. Rather than updating the prior post, which was on a slightly separate matter, this post will be kept as a rolling tally of Israeli operations in Syria, focused only on those since war broke out. Continue reading