Over the weekend, the news broke that on August 7, Mohammad al-Masri—the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s number two—was gunned-down on the streets of Tehran alongside Osama bin Laden’s daughter-in-law. According to multiple unnamed U.S. officials, he was assassinated by Israeli agents operating at Washington’s behest. Masri had organized the 1998 attack on the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which left a total of 224 people dead; in 2002 he orchestrated a botched attack on Israeli targets in Mombasa, Kenya, that left thirteen dead. Yoav Limor seeks to explain both the reasons for the strike on Masri, and for the decision to leak the details:

If there is to be a resolution to the conflict between the Jewish state and a putative Palestinian one, writes Jonathan Michanie, it won’t start with drawing lines on maps or restrictions on where Jews can build houses, but with the Palestinian Authority (PA) abandoning its official anti-Semitism. The PA can, in this regard, learn much from those Arab nations that have recently made peace with Israel: