• U.S. Cooperated Secretly with Syrian Kurds in Battle Against Islamic State at Kobane - Adam Entous, Joe Parkinson and Julian E. Barnes
  After Islamic State made the Syrian city of Kobane a test of its ability to defy U.S. air power, Washington intervened more forcefully than it had initially intended to try to stem the group's momentum. Top U.S. officials concluded that Kobane had become too symbolically important to lose and they raced to save it.
      As the U.S. role rapidly evolved, U.S. and Syrian Kurdish commanders began to coordinate air and ground operations far more closely. A Syrian Kurdish general in a joint operations center in northern Iraq delivered daily battlefield intelligence reports to U.S. military planners, and helped spot targets for airstrikes on Islamic State positions.
      The Syrian Kurds are avowedly secular and pro-Western. They field female fighters and are committed to combating Islamic State. Kurdish officials say several Americans, including two ex-marines, and dozens of European volunteers, have enlisted to fight alongside the Kurds in Kobane. (Wall Street Journal)
• UN Chief Says Moving Ahead with Gaza War Inquiry
  After his visit to Gaza in the wake of the recent conflict, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council on Tuesday: "I look forward to a thorough investigation by the Israeli Defense Forces of...incidents in which UN facilities sustained hits and many innocent people were killed. I am planning to move forward with an independent Board of Inquiry to look into the most serious of those cases, as well as instances in which weaponry was found on UN premises."  (United Nations)
      See also below Observations: Did Israel Avert a Hamas Massacre? - Adam Ciralsky (Vanity Fair)

• Ya'alon: Israel Worried about Iran Deal - Yitzhak Benhorin
  Israel is concerned about the shape of an international agreement with Iran over its nuclear aspirations, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said Tuesday after talks with his American counterpart Chuck Hagel in Washington. "The Iranian issue indeed worries us," said Ya'alon. "We've said all along that better no agreement than a bad agreement, and the question is what are they discussing at the moment, are they talking about how many centrifuges there will be and, if so, why should they have centrifuges at all?...Are they talking about other elements of the Iranian military nuclear project such as missiles ready for nuclear warheads?"  (Ynet News)
      See also Defense Minister Ya'alon Blasts Turkey, Erdogan as "Leaders of Muslim Brotherhood Axis" - Chemi Shalev
  Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon on Tuesday described Turkey as the leader, along with Qatar, of the Middle East's "Muslim Brotherhood Axis" and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a "known follower" of the Islamist group. Ya'alon also told journalist Charlie Rose on PBS that Hamas had moved its operations from Syria to Turkey and had set up a "terror headquarters" in Istanbul alongside the one operating in Gaza.
      During a visit to Washington, Ya'alon made a point of thanking the U.S. for its support, especially for the Iron Dome anti-missile system. "Even if there are disagreements between the U.S. and Israel, they should not be allowed to cloud the deep friendship and warm, intimate ties between the two countries," he said.
      Ya'alon said that he once endorsed an agreement based on an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, until he realized that the Palestinians would never make do with such an accord. (Ha'aretz)
• EU Seeks Talks with Israel over "Red Lines" in West Bank - Barak Ravid
  Discussions have been taking place at EU headquarters in Brussels between the ambassadors of the 28 members states over the European response to Israeli moves which an internal EU document describes as creating a "threat to the possibility of the two-state solution." The document defines several of the EU's "red lines" regarding Israeli actions in the West Bank: construction in the Givat Hamatos neighborhood in Jerusalem, construction in the E1 area between Ma'aleh Adumim and Jerusalem, further construction in the Har Homa neighborhood in Jerusalem, plans to relocate 12,000 Bedouin in a new town in the Jordan Valley, and changing the status-quo at the Temple Mount. (Ha'aretz)

• U.S. Humanitarian Aid Going to ISIS, Aid NGOs Employ ISIS People - Jamie Dettmer
  Truckloads of U.S. and Western aid have been flowing into territory controlled by Islamic State jihadists. The aid, meant for displaced Syrian civilians, is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, European donors, and the UN. The aid convoys have to pay off ISIS leaders in order to enter eastern Syrian extremist strongholds.
      "The convoys have to be approved by ISIS and you have to pay them: The bribes are disguised and itemized as transportation costs," says an aid coordinator. The kickbacks are paid by NGOs tasked with distributing the aid, or by Turkish or Syrian transportation companies contracted to deliver it. Moreover, aid coordinators say ISIS insists that the NGOs employ people ISIS approves on their staffs inside Syria. "There is always at least one ISIS person on the payroll; they force people on us," says an aid coordinator.
      "A few months ago we delivered a mobile clinic for a USAID-funded NGO," says one aid worker. "The clinic was earmarked for the treatment of civilians, but we all know that wounded ISIS fighters could easily be treated as well. So what are we doing here helping their fighters, who we are bombing, to be treated so they can fight again?"  (Daily Beast)
• Klinghoffer: A Night at the Opera - Walter Russell Mead
  "The Death of Klinghoffer" is a 1991 opera based, loosely, on the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro, a cruise ship, by a group of Palestinian terrorists. During the hijacking the Palestinians murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair bound, 69-year-old Jewish American passenger.
      The real problem, and it is a serious one, involves the decision to use a family's tragedy for art without the permission of the family's members. Nothing gave the composers a moral right to profit from his death. (American Interest)
      See also An Injustice to our Father's Memory - Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer (JTA)
      See also "Death of Klinghoffer": Violence Porn at the Met Opera - Seth Lipsky
  The Jewish leadership in New York has for months been protesting plans to mount this production. The protest Monday, across the street from Lincoln Center, included former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Reps. Peter King and Carolyn Maloney, Ronald Lauder of the World Jewish Congress, and former New York Governor David Paterson.
      At the end of the day, "The Death of Klinghoffer" is about watching a Jew get shot to death in the back of the head. Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer's brave daughters, Lisa and Ilsa, were right to denounce the Met's staging of the murder. It's an orgy of violence pornography at the expense of their father and the Jews.
      It is bizarre to sit in an opera house in the middle of the city with the world's second largest Jewish population and hear its performance greeted with a long ovation while the conductor and cast take their bows. (New York Sun)

Did Israel Avert a Hamas Massacre? - Adam Ciralsky (Vanity Fair)

• Israeli intelligence officials agreed to share the backstory of how earlier this year they may have narrowly averted their nation's own 9/11. The plan of attack (as pieced together by defense and security professionals through electronic intercepts, informants, interrogations of Hamas operatives, as well as computers and satellite imagery obtained from Hamas compounds during the war) was chilling: a surprise assault in which scores of heavily armed Hamas insurgents were set to emerge from more than a dozen cross-border tunnels and proceed to kill as many Israelis as possible.
• Hamas created a secret commando unit, called Nukhba, and trained its men to fight and maneuver through the tunnels on foot and on small motorcycles. According to an official in the Israel Security Agency, which has been interrogating Hamas members who were captured during the fighting, the Nukhba fighters "were an elite force...[trained] to execute strategic terrorist attacks....[They would be] heavily armed: RPGs, Kalashnikovs, M-16s, hand grenades, and night-vision equipment." To maximize the element of surprise, they would wear IDF uniforms.
• A year ago, workers at Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha, which sits on the border with Gaza, heard digging underground and called in the IDF, which discovered a massive tunnel located 50 feet below the surface. It ran a mile and a half from the village of Abbasan Al-Saghira, in Gaza. IDF Captain Daniel explained, "They had a specific plan: 20 to 30 terrorists would emerge from the opening of the tunnel and attack the residents of Ein Hashlosha." After the tunnel's discovery, Israel halted the transfer of construction materials into Gaza. Last March, another tunnel was uncovered, penetrating three times farther into Israel.
• "Hamas had a plan," says Lt.-Col. Peter Lerner, summarizing on the record what six senior intelligence officials would describe on background. "A simultaneous, coordinated, surprise attack within Israel. They planned to send 200 terrorists armed to the teeth toward civilian populations. This was going to be a coordinated attack. The concept of operations involved 14 offensive tunnels into Israel. With at least 10 men in each tunnel, they would infiltrate and inflict mass casualties."
• As a senior military intelligence official explained, the anticipated attack was designed with two purposes: "First, get in and massacre people in a village. Pull off something they could show on television. Second, the ability to kidnap soldiers and civilians using the tunnels would give them a great bargaining chip."
• On July 7, Israeli jets bombed a tunnel that began in Rafah, in Gaza, and exited near Kibbutz Kerem Shalom, killing seven members of Hamas. Highly placed government sources say they feared these operatives were the first wave. "We expected the mass attack in July," a senior military intelligence official explains. The next day, all hell broke loose, with Hamas firing some 150 rockets. Over the next 10 days, Hamas would send some 1,500 more.
• All told, Israeli military and intelligence sources say that they found and destroyed 32 tunnels within Gaza, 14 of which crossed into Israel, and believe that they managed to stave off a mass terror attack. Still, Hamas fighters used the underground network to emerge inside Israel and pull off several attacks that claimed the lives of 11 IDF soldiers.