IDF forces on the northern border were on maximum alert Monday following a weekend which saw errant mortar fire land inside Israeli territory and Israeli airstrikes against Assad regime forces in retaliation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a stern warning at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, saying Israel’s “policy is clear. We will not accept any kind of ‘drizzle, not of mortars, rockets, or spillover fire [from the Syrian Civil War]. We respond with force to every attack on our territory and against our citizens.”

Sheik Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Lebanese Shi’ite terror militia Hezbollah, issued a fiery speech on Friday, via video link from an undisclosed location, that Israel was placing itself in grave danger by striking the Assad regime in Syria as thousands of devoted Shi’ite warriors from around the world were prepared to strike the Jewish State. Analysts speculated that Nasrallah was referring to the large numbers of Shi’ite militias Iran has scraped together for the battles in Syria and Iraq, often giving them obsolete weapons and using them as cannon fodder against more heavily armed Sunni terror militias.

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem unveiled a computer algorithm recently which allows for the rapid discovery of drugs which can be used to treat all manner of health conditions, earning Prof. Amiram Goldblum of the Institute for Drug Research of the Hebrew University School of Pharmacy a 2017 Kaye Innovation Award. The Iterative Stochastic Elimination algorithm was developed in Goldblum’s lab and has already led to improved treatment at medical facilities around the world.

A pair of decisions by the Israeli government over the weekend, one to indefinitely postpone a plan to create a space at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City for non-Orthodox prayer and another to give Israel’s Chief Rabbinate full authority over the issue of conversions to Judaism, were decried by Jewish communities around the world. The Jewish Agency took the step on Monday of cancelling a dinner event it had planned to hold with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of its upcoming Board of Governors meetings in Jerusalem, while opposition politicians in the Knesset warned of creeping Fascism.

The current race for control of territory in Syria now appears to be a competition between Iran and the United States, which have established two respective axes – with a vertical American (north-south) effort on the one hand, and a horizontal Iranian (east-west) effort on the other hand.