In recently leaked audio tapes, the Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif reports that then-Secretary of State John Kerry told him that Israel had carried out at least 200 strikes on Iranian targets in Syria. David Harsanyi comments:

A high-ranking American official feels comfortable sharing this information with an autocratic adversary—a government that’s murdered hundreds of Americans, regularly kidnapped them, interfered with our elections, and propped up a regime that gasses its own people—about the covert actions of a long-time American ally. What else did he tell Zarif? . . . It wouldn’t be surprising if Israel was more reluctant to share intel with the United States when [diplomats] such as Kerry show more fondness for those making genocidal threats against the Jewish people than they do for the state that protects them.

During the Obama years, [supporters of the 2015 nuclear deal] would offer an ugly false choice: you either support diplomacy with the “moderate” wing of the theocratic state, or you endorse “war”; either fly unmarked euros in tonnage and bail out the mullahs, or plunge America into another Iraq war. At one point, President Obama claimed that the Republican caucus was making “common cause” with Iranian hardliners.

The opposite was true. In the leaked audio from Zarif, we hear that the military and theocratic forces in the nation “call the shots” and overrule “government decisions and ignoring advice.” . . . Zarif says that the political wing is “severely constricted” and decisions “are dictated by the supreme leader or Revolutionary Guards Corps.” Obama’s contention that the Iran deal was being forged with the “moderate faction” was always a fantasy.

The former secretary of state, and current special presidential envoy for climate, has denied the reports.

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.