Not far from the Dead Sea, a team of archaeologists has located a large building of unknown purpose, dating to the period not long before the Maccabean revolt. Yaron Drukman reports:

A massive pyramid-shaped structure and a roadside station dating back approximately 2,200 years—to the era of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid rulers in Judea—are being unearthed. . . . Matan Toledano, Eitan Klein, and Amir Ganor, who are overseeing the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, described the pyramid—about six meters (20 feet) high—as one of the most intriguing and significant finds in the Judean Desert.

“This excavation is reshaping our understanding of the site’s history,” said Toledano, Klein, and Ganor. “Contrary to previous theories that attributed the structure to the First Temple period, it appears to have been built later, during the Hellenistic period under Ptolemaic rule. We still don’t know for certain what its function was. Was it a military outpost guarding a major trade route for transporting salt and asphalt from the Dead Sea to the coast? Or, at some point, did this massive structure atop the mountain serve as a tomb marker or an ancient monument?”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.