Already high tensions in the Persian Gulf spiked Thursday morning following a report that Iranian air-defense units had shot down a US Navy MQ-4C Triton surveillance drone in international airspace over the Strait of Hormuz. Officials from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) claimed the drone had been shot down after violating Iranian airspace. Also on Thursday morning, Iranian-backed Houthi factions in Yemen claimed to have hit a power station in Al-Shuqaiq city in Saudi Arabia’s Jizan Province with a cruise missile.

A meeting of the national security advisers of Israel, the US and Russia scheduled to take place in Jerusalem on Monday received a strong endorsement from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who told reporters on Wednesday that “This is a very important contact. The sides will have a vital exchange of views on the situation in the region, namely the Middle East settlement, the settlement process in Syria and other issues, which they consider necessary to discuss.”

In another devastating blow to the movement to Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) Israel, the French parliament hosted a conference Wednesday bringing together French and Israeli experts on innovation in fields of high-tech, startups, civil society and NGOs. Israeli experts touted the success their programs have had in placing Israeli-Arab graduates in the Jewish State’s blossoming hi-tech industry, among other success stories. Also on Wednesday, Israeli defense firm Elbit systems announced it had secured a $73 million contract with the German Air Force to install missile-defense systems on cargo aircraft.

The latest annual QS World University Rankings for 2019-2020 were released this week with Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University and Haifa’s Technion–Israel Institute of Technology once again being ranked among the top 300 institutions of higher learning globally. Additionally, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev was ranked at 419, Bar-Ilan University was ranked in the 551-560 range and the University of Haifa was ranked in the 651-700 range. Elsewhere, the prestigious scientific journal Nature ranked the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot as the third top university worldwide for high-quality research in the natural sciences.

Israeli sports fans had something to cheer about this week as fencer Yuval Freilich, ranked 40th in the world, defeated 13th ranked Italian athlete Andrea Santarelli to bring home a gold medal in the European Fencing Championships in Dusseldorf, Germany. “It’s the most incredible feeling,” he said in an interview posted to Facebook by the European Fencing Confederation. “Really a fantastic day. Everything connected, the fencing, the energy, the feeling. It just all came together and this is what came out. Amazing, really unbelievable feeling.”

The Palestinian leadership is engaging in a concerted propaganda campaign to undermine the U.S.-Bahrain initiative to convene the “Peace to Prosperity” economic workshop in Manama, Bahrain, aimed at assisting the Palestinian economy. Logic would assume that any initiative to improve the Palestinian economy and the welfare and prosperity of its public would be welcomed as a positive development. However, the Palestinian leadership appears to prefer engaging in a senseless and self-damaging propaganda campaign against the initiative rather than to welcome it.

As Israel prepares to host an unprecedented trilateral meeting with U.S. and Russian officials to discuss Syria and other regional issues, the Assad regime faces proliferating challenges in the northwest and may not be able to recover large portions of the territory it lost. What are U.S. interests in Syria today, and will the Jerusalem meeting advance them in any substantial way? Can Russia and Assad be relied upon to push Iran out of the country? A panel of experts weighs in.

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