1-Jan-12: Terror attack statistics climbed sharply in December - no wonder this man is smiling so broadly

Haniya on left, Erdogan on right. The Hamas man's Cheshire cat grin
is understandable given the sharp rise in terrorist attacks on
Israeli civilians living just the other side of his fence, and the warm
welcome he has gotten in Turkey and - earlier in the
trip - in Egypt, Sudan, Qatar, Bahrain and Tunisia. It's a new Middle
East, ladies and gentlemen.

Israel's internal security service, known as the Shin Bet outside Israel and Shabak within, says today the country experienced 81 security incidents during December, an increase of 84% over November's 44.

Twenty-five of them were executed here in Jerusalem, more than a three-fold increase over the previous month. And 30 attacks emanated from the Gaza Strip (involving 30 rockets plus 11 mortar shells), compared with November's 11 (ten rockets, one mortar shell).

Meanwhile, the man who - perhaps more than anyone else - personifies the terrorist face of the regime that rules Gaza spent much of the day today (Sunday) in the residence of Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Ismail Haniyeh, the Gazan head of Hamas (as distinct from Khaled Mashaal who runs the rest of Hamas from Damascus but may be moving himself from there to Amman this week in view of recent discomfiting events in Syria) was invited to a closed-doors meeting with Erdogan in Istanbul. Haniyeh is in the midst of a tour of the Muslim world, his first travels outside Gaza since Hamas thugs seized control there in a bloody struggle with the forces of the other major Palestinian Arab faction, Fatah, in 2007.

The Turks are famously gracious hosts; the head of the other Palestinian Arab terror group Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas - who presides over the so-far-non-Hamas-controlled parts of the Palestinian Authority lands - was Erdogan's guest a few weeks ago.