Twenty-eight years ago this month, Hizballah—with the help of its Iranian patrons—detonated a massive bomb at the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, leaving 85 dead and hundreds wounded. On the 2012 anniversary of the bombing, Hizballah attacked a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria, killing six. But the Lebanese-based terrorist group has had no success in murdering Jews outside of Israel since then, although not for lack of trying. Oved Lobel argues that Israeli counterterrorism is the reason why:

While Israel has demonstrated the capability to assassinate almost any Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hizballah operative or Iranian nuclear scientist—or even al-Qaeda leaders working under the auspices of the IRGC—including in Iran itself, Iran is suffering an ever-expanding backlog of people it needs to avenge.

In 2008, an alleged joint CIA-Mossad operation killed Hizballah’s terrorist mastermind Imad Mughniyeh in Syria. In response, the IRGC attempted multiple attacks, both assassinations and bombings, across the world. All of them failed; . . . planned and attempted attacks from Azerbaijan to Georgia to India to Thailand to Cyprus and across Africa, the Middle East, and South America since 2006 were all foiled, while Hizballah’s global stockpiling of ammonium nitrate for explosives was revealed by Israeli intelligence. In 2012 alone, the year of the Burgas bombing, there were reportedly at least nine IRGC plots against Jewish or Israeli targets across the world, including a previous attempt in Bulgaria.

It appears the reason Israel is able to conduct such operations, including infrastructure sabotage against Iranian military and nuclear targets, is because of its comprehensive intelligence penetration of the IRGC and every other relevant organization in Iran at every level, something obvious for several years and publicly acknowledged by multiple Iranian officials.

When he called upon Hamas to end the war and release the hostages last week, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was also getting ready for a reshuffle within his regime. On Saturday, he appointed Hussein al-Sheikh deputy president of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is intimately tied to the PA itself. Al-Sheikh would therefore succeed Abbas—who is eighty-nine and reportedly in ill health—as head of the PLO if he should die or become incapacitated, and be positioned to succeed him as head of the PA as well.

Al-Sheikh spent eleven years in an Israeli prison and, writes Maurice Hirsch, was involved in planning a 2002 Jerusalem suicide bombing that killed three. Moreover, Hirsch writes, he “does not enjoy broad Palestinian popularity or support.”

Still, by appointing Al-Sheikh, Abbas has taken a step in the internal reforms he inaugurated last year in the hope that he could prove to the Biden administration and other relevant players that the PA was up to the task of governing the Gaza Strip. Neomi Neumann writes:

Abbas’s motivation for reform also appears rooted in the need to meet the expectations of Arab and European donors without compromising his authority. On April 14, the EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas approved a three-year aid package worth 1.6 billion euros, including 620 million euros in direct budget support tied to reforms. Meanwhile, the French president Emmanuel Macron held a call with Abbas [earlier this month] and noted afterward that reforms are essential for the PA to be seen as a viable governing authority for Gaza—a telling remark given reports that Paris may soon recognize “the state of Palestine.”

In some cases, reforms appear targeted at specific regional partners. The idea of appointing a vice-president originated with Saudi Arabia.

In the near term, Abbas’s main goal appears to be preserving Arab and European support ahead of a major international conference in New York this June.