... a gigantic deposit of natural gas called Leviathan, 6.5 times the size of Tel Aviv, was found, roughly 100 nautical miles from where the flotilla fiasco took place and well within Israel's extended territorial waters. This discovery may provide Israel with security in terms of its supply of electricity, turn it into an important natural gas exporter and provide a shot in the arm of some $300 billion over the life of the field - one-and-a-half times the national GDP - to the Israeli economy, already one of the most resilient in the world.

More importantly, this discovery is nothing short of a geopolitical game changer. To understand its magnitude, consider this: The world's biggest gas discovery in 2009, 238 billion cubic meters, was made by a U.S.-Israel consortium at a site called Tamar, 60 miles off the coast of Haifa. The nearby Leviathan field is estimated to be twice that size. Altogether the basin in the eastern Mediterranean to which those fields belong could contain an amount of gas equivalent to one-fifth of U.S. natural gas reserves. For a small country like Israel, such a bonanza could not have come at a better time.

Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran's nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal. In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran.