Last Sunday, representatives of the respective rulers of the Palestinian Authority and Gaza met in Doha with Qatari and Turkish officials to discuss temporarily setting aside their differences, ostensibly as a prerequisite to renewed negotiation with Israel. Ruthie Blum doubts the talks will produce tangible results, let alone good ones:

[T]he only thing on which Fatah and Hamas actually agree is the ultimate goal of annihilating the Jewish state. They are at odds about everything else, including the pace at which their shared aim should be carried out. But mainly, they . . . are engaged in a deadly power struggle.

So perpetual is this battle that the so-called unity deals the two groups signed in the past, most recently in April 2014, have unraveled before the ink on their contracts was dry. But the signatures did serve an unwitting purpose: to show those who still could not see that the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, was a partner for jihad, not peace with Israel. . . . The current wave of violence against Jews, through the use of rocks, knives, cars, and pipe bombs, is being carried out predominantly by Palestinians living in the West Bank, not all of whom are Hamas loyalists.

For its part, Hamas is not only rebuilding the terror tunnels destroyed during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, but it keeps releasing videos boasting of this endeavor and threatening to kidnap and kill Israelis. . . . Hamas’s latest production, released on Sunday (coinciding with the jump-start of negotiations with Fatah in Qatar) is a music video calling on Palestinians to resume suicide bombings on Israeli buses. . . .

How appropriate, then, that the discussions between the stabbers and the bombers should be held in Qatar, a state sponsor of terrorism. The only minimally positive outcome will be the lack of a resolution. . . . The only player in this jihadist “peace” farce that has something to gain is Turkey, which will get its [natural-gas] pipeline from Israel, without even turning its back on Hamas.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.