A suicide bomb attack on a Hezbollah neighborhood in Beirut and more clashes between anti and pro-Assad forces in Tripoli have left 12 dead and scores wounded as Lebanon continues on the path to the resumption of the 15-year old civil war that ended in 1990 with Syrian domination.

The bomb blast in the Hezbollah neighborhood of Haret Herek killed at least five people and wounded more than 45 others. It was the second attack in almost the same spot in the past week, and one retired Lebanese general told Al Jazeera, “We have to expect more and more operations against the public. Why are the public a target? Because they want to put direct pressure on Hezbollah to withdraw from Lebanon.”

An Al Qaeda linked terrorist group took responsibility for the suicide car bomb blast shortly before noon Tuesday. Witnesses said they saw a man deriving his KIA vehicle, with a stolen license plate, at high speed and “honking his horn like a mad man” seconds before it blew up.

Hezbollah is getting a taste of its own poison, facing suicide attacks that have been one of its favorite methods of terrorizing Lebanon, such as the savage attack that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Harari and 21 others. Syria has been blamed for involvement in the car bomb explosion

In Tripoli, one person died and several others were wounded in gunfire on Tuesday, bring to seven the death since the most recent eruption of violence on Friday. Alawites, who back Syrian President Bassar al-Assad, and anti-Assad Sunni Muslim gangs fired mortar shells, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns in fighting that raged through the early morning hours. At least six have been killed and more than 55 others wounded since Friday.

The United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon Derek Plumbly, commenting on the suicide bombing in Beirut, said  the explosion presents “a further deeply disturbing act of indiscriminate terror” and that “such acts cannot be justified and are contrary to the interests of all the Lebanese.”

The U.S. Embassy in Beirut, for what it’s worth, denounced the attack and offered its condolences to the victims and their families via Twitter.

It is nice that officials in the Obama administration know how to use social media, but they have been unaware of their failure to understand that the axis of evil has to be fought and not “engaged.”

The result now is the spread of civil war across Israel’s northern border, from the Golan Heights to the east and westward to the Mediterranean Sea.

The instability keeps the locals busy killing each other, which is fine as long as they don’t realize they could simply join forces and take out their anger on Israel.

The United States has backed an ultimatum by Syrian opposition forces to rescind an invitation to Iran to joint the Geneva II peace talks scheduled for Wednesday unless Tehran publicly accepts that the conference will establish a political process to end the rule of Syrian President Bassar al-Assad.

The peace talks appeared to be over before they were to start following an ultimatum Monday by the  Syrian National Coalition that the invitation be rescinded by Monday night.

“The Syrian Coalition announces that they will withdraw their attendance in Geneva II unless Ban Ki-moon retracts Iran’s invitation,” it said in a Twitter post.

The coalition said it could accept Iran at the talks only if it were to remove its forces  fighting with  to maintain his control of war-torn country.

Given pre-conditions by Assad and the Opposition concerning a future government, the chances of anything positive coming out of Geneva II are nil.

A 19 year old resident of Migdal Shams is in light to medium condition after being shot at near the Syrian border with Israel.

The man was taken to Ziv hospital in Tzfat with a bullet wound in his leg.

The hospital said the bullet was shot was a long distance.

The IDF said it is unaware of the incident.

The Al Qaeda-linked ISIL terrorist organization attacked a rebel-held city in northern Syria on Wednesday and killed at least 26 people in a car bomb explosion.

Fighting between the rebels and ISIL has developed into a second civil war with the broader civil war between Syrian President Bassar al-Assad and opposition forces.

ISIL denied claims by rebel spokesman that its commander was killed in a clash with rebels. The commander is from Belgium, and the Belgian foreign ministry confirmed that it hard of reports that he was dead.

At least 13 Iraqi soldiers and 18 Syrians, including woman and children, were killed Thursday in another round of the seemingly endless fighting in both countries.

Iraq was supposed to be safe from democracy after the American invasion, but it has been neither safe nor democratic since then. Bombings by anti-government and Al Qaeda terrorists have returned as an almost daily event.

Thursday’s suicide bombing struck an airfield where Iraqi recruits were registering,

The car bomb in Syria exploded in the province of Hama, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Syria’s official state media claimed on Wednesday that opposition forces attacked two of its chemical weapons facilities.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Pickering has stated that Jonathan Pollard is a “traitor” but should be released from prison if it would convince Israel to agree to sign an agreement with the Palestinian Authority.

It is incomprehensible that a patriotic American like Pickering can state that a man, an alleged traitor to the United States and who should remain in jail for life, can be freed for the sake of a diplomatic plum for President Barack Obama.

Pollard is far from a traitor by any definition and never was convicted of spying. Calling him a traitor is plain libel. He was caught handing over classified information for Israel, an offense that never has been punished for more than four years in jail until the Pollard trial, such as it was.

Pollard himself has argued against being used as barter for Israel’s freeing Palestinian Authority murderers, which Israel has done time and time again anyway while  Pollard remains in jail.

Pickering is not the only former U.S. ambassador to Israel who says Pollard should be released. Samuel W. Lewis, who was the envoy from 1977 to 1985, also has come out for his being released, but Lewis rejected the linkage with the so-called peace process. “He betrayed us, and I am glad he sat in prison, but 28 years is time enough,” he said.

Pickering stated, “I think that achieving an Israeli-Palestinian framework agreement is far more important than the continuation of Pollard’s incarceration.”

It is astounding that a distinguished 40-year veteran of the Foreign Service could even suggest that a country, in this case Israel, would give up its sense of security and gamble on its future in order to win the release of Pollard.

But if we understand that Pickering, by default of  having been an employee of the State Dept., has the same clone mentality of everyone else in Foggy Bottom, it all makes sense.

Who else but a State Dept. veteran would say, as Pickering did in a speech in 2010 to the Florida Atlantic University, “Peace can be made between Syria and Israel”?

Actually three was one non-State Dept. man who said that. Meet John Kerry, who as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his pre-State Dept. days commuted to Damascus, chummed with Syrian President Bassar al-Assad and knew he was on the way to a peace agreement.

Well, you can’t win them all. But Kerry can’t win anything.

Kerry undoubtedly would suggest to  Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that Pollard be freed if he were to think that the Prime Minister would make “painful concessions.”

Pollard has suffered for too many years in prison, but no one can imagine the suffering he would go through if President Obama were to free him in return for Israel’s surrendering the Jordan Valley, surrendering Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem or even only over the Old City, expelling tens of thousands of Jews and accepting another armed Arab country as a neighbor.

Such a scenario  is unlikely not because Kerry is not capable of offering Pollard for a Piece of Peace paper – Kerry is capable of selling his grandmother for that – but because it won’t happen.

It is so immoral that it cannot comprehended by anyone except a State Dept. veteran like Pickering.

The United Nations no longer will report on how many people have been killed in the raging Syrian civil war because it says it no longer has enough sources in the field for reliable information.

The last official count by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights was around 100,000, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said  that the verified figure is 130,000 but could be as high as 200,000. The United Nations say it could confirm or deny the estimate.

The number has risen by a few hundred or more the past week because of as a second war, pitting opposition forces against Al Qaeda terrorists, whom rebels accused of abuses, although the number of fighters in the war who have not committed abuses is somewhere around zero.

kidnappings, torture, assassinations and public executions have become routine practice by forces loyal to Syrian President Bassar al-Assad and by the opposition.

A security official in Damascus, referring to rebels and the Al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant told AFP that, “nothing unites them except terrorism.”

And there is nothing that could unite all parties in the war – including jihadists and Assad – except Israel.

A spoof website now offers the world “John Kerry Solutions, Ltd,” an offer for anyone wanting to solve problems as he has done the past year in the Middle East.

The My Israel organization, in coordination with the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea and Samaria, created the website with its promotional material below:

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In light of  his  great diplomatic experience, in recent years he has been acting in the Middle East with great success and brought creative solutions that transformed the region.

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Our company thanks the good people who helped us in Israel besides Minister – Tzipi Livni and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.