This would have been his path. According to the gospels, it was in the area of Bethany and Bethphage that Jesus would have stayed each evening of the Passover holiday--on the far slope of the Mount of Olives, where his followers Mary and Martha lived and where he raised their brother Lazarus from the dead. During the festival it was a tradition and a necessity for pilgrims to spend the night on the outlying hills. Each morning Jesus would have ...

Israel is bracing for more Arab Spring showers this Sunday, as Palestinians plan to mark the June 5 anniversary of the 1967 war with a new round of protests. That war left Israel occupying East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza , which could be the focus of Sunday's actions. Just two weeks ago, on May 15, "Nakba Day' demonstrations saw Palestinian refugees trying to breach Israel's borders in protest against the confiscation of their families' homes ...

One mystery of Yasser Arafat's life seemed unsolved at the time of his death: How much money did he have, and where is it? In the mid-1990s, Arafat controlled a financial empire worth at least $3 billion. By the time of his death, he was down to his last $1 billion, according to Israeli intelligence estimates. Palestinian leaders believe his widow Suha would like to make off with what is left of his cash, a suspicion deepened by her charges ...

His captors put out cigarettes on Haitham Amro's body. His thighs were a carpet of bruises, green, yellow and blue, and his back striped by lashes. The angle of the wounds on his wrists indicated he had been suspended above the ground by handcuffs for some time before his corpse was brought, on his fourth day in custody, to the hospital where they recognized it immediately, Amro having worked there for years as a nurse. But to the ...

When Syrian tanks and soldiers poured into the rebellious southern flashpoint city of Dara'a last month, the Twittersphere lit up with wry comments like "Hey army, that's Dara'a, not the Golan!" mocking the fact that the same army shooting its own people hadn't fired a bullet in decades to liberate the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 war and still the center of the long-simmering conflict between Israel and Syria. In fact, Damascus has long ...

South Lebanon Sunday witnessed its deadliest day since the month-long Israel-Hizballah 2006 war when 10 Palestinian demonstrators were reported shot dead and another 112 wounded as Israeli troops opened fire on protests along the border fence. The casualties came as a massive crowd of Palestinians gathered at Maroun er Ras, a small hilltop village overlooking the border with Israel, to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when the state of Israel was established. By Sunday night, the militant Lebanese Shi'ite group ...

Reports of a thaw in Egyptian-Iranian diplomatic ties has created a stir in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt and its neighbor, Israel. Indeed, even as Egypt struggles to iron out its own emerging political system after the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak, Cairo's foreign policy is also undergoing a sea change. "If you look at Egypt over the last 20 years, it just hasn't played a very serious role in the foreign affairs of the region," ...

Battling terrorism on the home front could forever be tangled up in politics, but what if it weren't? Suppose it were up to the antiterrorism pros alone to decide when to warn the public, what to say about the source of their intelligence and the actions the government is taking to neutralize the threat. Is there an obvious way to handle the sudden evidence that terrorists have plans to strike? Probably not. Few people could disagree last week with ...

He changes his appearance frequently. "Yesterday, my beard was out to here," he says, cupping a hand an inch from a cheek now shaved clean. He sleeps only in a secure, undisclosed location, though never more than two or three hours. Fugitives have a long history in the Gaza Strip, only this one is on the run not from the Israelis but from Hamas. "They are looking for everyone, not only for me," says Abu Yazan, ...

Israel is denying Palestinians access to adequate water supplies by controlling shared water resources, the human rights group Amnesty International said in a report released Tuesday.He said that Israeli consumption of water from the mountain aquifer had gone down in absolute terms from 1967 to today, despite the fact that Israel's population had more than doubled in that time to its current level of approximately 7 million people. A statement from the Israeli Foreign Ministry charges that the authors of ...