Next week, a region-wide “economic workshop” is scheduled to take place in Manama to discuss, inter alia, avenues for improving economic conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has announced that his government will boycott the conference—which is co-sponsored by the U.S.—and Palestinian businesses seem to have given in to pressure from Abbas’s government to do the same. Alan Baker decries the futility of Abbas’s approach, which also likely violates the Oslo Accords:

Starting yesterday evening, Hamas and its allies in Gaza fired over 150 rockets into Israel—and not only at towns and cities in the south of the country but also at Jerusalem. These attacks followed days of sporadic rocket and mortar fire, incendiary devices attached to balloons, and other acts of terror, as well as rioting in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Benny Avni comments on the response from abroad: