“Top Egyptian intelligence officers met recently with senior Hamas officials from outside the Gaza Strip to discuss the poor relations between Egypt and the Strip’s Hamas regime, senior officials of the Islamist organization confirmed on Tuesday,” Israel’s Haarez wrote on Wednesday.
Saudi Arabia may lift a ban that requires women to receive permission from a man in order to travel. It is one of a few reforms being considered in the conservative Islamic kingdom. The International Business Times (IBT) suggests terrorism might ease the restrictive laws against women.
The Pakistani government lifted its moratorium on the death penalty permanently in March, which led to more than 150 executions in the last six months. Pakistan now executes more people than Saudi Arabia, but it is important to note why.
A 22-year-old Yemeni rapper, who has become the first high-profile female artist of her kind in the troubled Arab nation, is receiving threats. Amani Yahya fled to Saudi Arabia due to the civil war engulfing Yemen and has dedicated her artistic career to shining a light on the suffering of Yemeni women and defying cultural norms for women in the devout Muslim nation.
Global outrage and criticism from the United States, United Nations, European Union and Canada was not enough to keep Saudi Arabia’s supreme court from upholding their extreme sentencing of 10 years in prison and 1,000 blood-curdling lashes as punishment for liberal blogger Raif Badawi, 31, on charges for insulting the religion of Islam.
Contents: South Korea fears that MERS virus will break out into general population; Iran demands a nuclear agreement ‘snapback’ provision of its own
Four Saudi children have died and 28 others have been hospitalized due to a poisoning in an Iranian hotel. Three of the dead were only three years old and the fourth was a 14-year-old girl.
Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry denied allegations that his country could sell a nuclear weapon to Saudi Arabia, reports Daily Times.
Saudi Arabia hosted a two-day conference in Jeddah last week, which was attended by the president of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), where members convened to discuss measures to thwart religiously-motivated violence and discrimination.
Contents: Saudi Arabia shoots down Scud missile from Houthis in Yemen; Who’s causing the humanitarian crisis in Yemen?; Europeans rescue 3,000 migrants on Saturday, fear hundreds of thousands more
Al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria and Yemen are benefiting from the global focus on the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), quietly capturing territory and expanding their influence amid the turmoil in the war-ravaged countries, reports The Washington Post.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The growing Iranian influence in the Middle East has brought two historic enemies together, Israel and Saudi Arabia, officials from both countries revealed during a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) event.
A male supervisor on a university bus forced a woman to step out because she took off her veil, despite the fact that only other women were seated with her on the bus. The bus was transporting home the female students from the Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University for Women.
President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East is a failure, but he is responsible for at least one accidental success: bringing Israel and Saudi Arabia, once implacable foes, together in opposition to his agenda. On Thursday, Israel’s Dore Gold, the incoming director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, appeared in Washington, DC at the Council on Foreign Relations alongisde Anwar Majed Eshki, a former adviser to the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., and revealed secret Israeli-Saudi talks on Iran.
(Reuters) Saudi-led air strikes killed a group of around 20 Houthi fighters outside the southern Yemeni port city of Aden on Wednesday and also shook the capital Sanaa in the north, militiamen opposed to the Houthis said.
South Korean officials announced on Wednesday that they can confirm the existence of five new cases of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, commonly called MERS.
According to the Yemeni government-in-exile, United States diplomats are in discussions with Yemen’s Houthis, a Shiite rebel group which seized control of the Gulf country earlier this year.
Saudi Arabia plans on turning the birthplace of Wahhabism–just outside the capital city of Riyadh–into a tourist destination filled with entertainment, historic exhibits, parks, and restaurants.
The Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission (SACM) held its annual celebration and job fair last month just outside Washington, D.C. The four-day event begun on May 22 was “designed to reward the graduates on the King Abdullah Scholarship Program (KASP) with the chance to both celebrate their success with their colleagues as well as search for jobs and meet top executives from leading companies and universities in Saudi Arabia.”
The Houthis, Iran-backed rebels who overthrew the government of Yemen, have released one of four Americans held captive, according to CNN, relaying a report from Oman’s official news agency.
The Associated Press reports thousands of Shiites filled the streets in Saudi Arabia on Saturday to mourn the latest fatality from a pair of ISIS bomb attacks against Shiite mosques in the Kingdom.
The Associated Press cites a release from the official Saudi Press Agency to report a second suicide bomb attack against a Shiite mosque in the Kingdom. At least four people were killed in the Friday attack.
NATIONAL JOURNAL: If this were Iraq or Syria, these attacks—sadly—wouldn’t be surprising. But it’s not. It’s Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s most precious sites and the region’s most powerful Sunni rulers—a relatively vast territory, kept remarkably stable by the ruthless application of authoritarian rule while its neighbors teeter under the destabilizing weight of popular revolution and terrorist intervention.
Contents: ISIS suicide bombers strike Shia mosques in Saudi Arabia and Baghdad; ISIS continues to gain supporters throughout the Mideast
“Saudi-led airstrikes killed at least 80 people near Yemen’s border with Saudi Arabia and in the capital Sanaa Wednesday, residents said, the deadliest day of bombing in over two months of war in Yemen,” writes Reuters.
