In an unprecedented, three-year cyber espionage campaign, Iranian hackers created false social networking accounts and a fake news website to spy on military and political leaders in the United States, Israel and other countries, a cyber intelligence firm said on Thursday. ISight Partners, which uncovered the operation, said the hackers' targets include a four-star U.S. Navy admiral, U.S. lawmakers and ambassadors, members of the U.S.-Israeli lobby, and personnel from Britain, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The IDF Spokesperson on Saturday posted on its Twitter account a supposed image of some of the 100,000 missiles Hezbollah has aimed at Israeli cities – but there's a problem or two with it. The missiles shown are not to be found in Lebanon, or even in Syria, and only one of them could remotely be said to illustrate any threat posed against Israel. The photo, which appears to be from AFP/Getty Images, was used on an IDF Spokesperson tweet marking 14 years since the army withdrew from Lebanon. "#Israel troops left #Lebanon 14yrs ago.

Pope Francis waded into the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process upon arriving here on Sunday, issuing an extraordinary invitation to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and President Shimon Peres of Israel to join him in his home in the Vatican for “a heartfelt prayer to God for the gift of peace.”

With the collapse of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of young people across the Middle East are talking reconciliation online, a former Israeli peace negotiator and founder of the movement said Monday. The Facebook group, which has backing from celebrities including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Sharon Stone, has attracted almost 500,000 followers from around the region, including youths in the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Muslim countries that have no relations with Israel.

Every May, Israelis and Palestinians hold warring days of remembrance – one for the day their country was born, the other for the day their nation suffered a nakba, or "catastrophe." But amid all the waving of the Israeli flags this year, an Israeli NGO has launched a smartphone app to commemorate the more than 400 Palestinian villages depopulated or destroyed in the wake of Israel’s founding.  iNakba puts those villages back on the map, allowing users to upload photos, videos, stories, and other data to paint a picture of the former landscape. 

Internet, its online media sources and numerous digital services have become an essential part of international data exchange as well as a powerful instrument to influence public opinion worldwide. What countries are the most advanced users of the new digital tools? A research project conducted at Tel Aviv University's Department of Communications into the practice of "digital diplomacy" yielded rather unexpected results.
 

About a quarter of the world's population agrees that a number of negative statements about Jews are "probably true," according to a poll aimed at providing a statistical underpinning to the question of how widespread anti-Semitism is globally.  The League said its goal was to create a snapshot of anti-Semitic views in all parts of the world, to find ways to combat it, and to allow future surveys to measure whether, and where, the prejudice is rising or falling.