Report From Israel – Thursday, December 17, 2015

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Report From Israel – Thursday, December 17, 2015

Israel is experiencing more and more attempted stabbings, shootings and vehicular attacks against Israelis.

A Palestinian terrorist tried to run over IDF soldiers at the Hilhul Junction near Hebron today. Troops thwarted the attack, firing at the assailant, resulting in his death. Soldiers found a very large knife on his body.

Meanwhile, Israeli security forces tracked down the man who rammed his car into a group of soldiers near Beit Aryeh in Samaria Wednesday, injuring four.

A joint overnight operation by the Shin Bet, an undercover IDF unit and several police units located the driver, a Hamas operative and resident of a nearby Arab village. The terrorist told investigators he rammed the soldiers to avenge the “murder of Palestinian children” and defend the al-Aksa Mosque, which according to the Palestinian Authority, Israel intends to destroy.

Three of the four soldiers injured in the attack remained hospitalized Friday morning, while the fourth was well enough to be discharged.

Security forces located the abandoned car used in the attack and found an M-16 rifle and a stun grenade inside.

A day earlier, terrorists opened fire on an Israeli couple on their way home from a family Hanukkah celebration as they drove near Tulkarm. Authorities found 23 bullet holes in the car. The husband remains hospitalized in serious condition after suffering extensive head injuries in the crash. The wife is recovering from bullet wounds to her extremities.

Also on Wednesday, terrorists stabbed a soldier and a civilian near Beit Hadassah in Hebron.

Just two days after a poll showed that two-thirds of Palestinians support the current wave of stabbing attacks against Israelis, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon accused Israel of bringing the trouble on itself.

Ban said that the attacks are “bred from nearly five decades of Israeli occupation.”

The daily terror attacks against Israeli Jews are “the result of fear, humiliation, frustration and mistrust. It has been fed by the wounds of decades of bloody conflict, which will take a long time to heal. Palestinians youth in particular are tired of broken promises and they see no light at the end of the tunnel,” Ban said.

The U.N. leader was speaking at a conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, organized by the U.N. Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation on the Question of Jerusalem.

Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon said there is no justification for terror.

“Instead of wasting your time trying to rationalize Palestinian terrorism, the United Nations should confront the Palestinian Authority to eradicate incitement coming from its highest echelons, permeating into the education system and social networks,” Arutz-7 quoted Danon.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research released a poll earlier this week showing that 67 percent of Palestinians support the current wave of stabbings.

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) Sen. Marco Rubio (R–FL) will Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)

The US House of Representatives passed a sanctions bill Wednesday that would enhance sanctions against the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah and its supporters.

In a 425-0 vote, lawmakers approved mandatory sanctions on banking institutions that knowingly conduct transactions for the terror group. A similar bill in the Senate, authored by Senators Marco Rubio and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), was unanimously passed last month.

“We need to send a clear message to companies getting tangled up with this terrorist group,” Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), the top Democrat in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was quoted by The Hill as saying. “And that message is: Walk away, or face the consequences of the United States of America.”

The new bill is meant to instruct the Obama administration on reporting measures of Hezbollah’s activities, including drug trafficking and organized crime around the world. Companies that conduct business with Hezbollah’s television station, Al-Manar, would also come under scrutiny.

According to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA), the new bill is also meant to send a warning to the Iranian regime, a known sponsor of Hezbollah.

“This legislation represents an important first step in pushing back against Iran and Hezbollah and repairing the damage that the administration’s sanctions relief for Iran has done to our nation security,” Royce stated.

The sanctions outlined by the new bill will be terminated only after Hezbollah is no longer blacklisted by the US government as a terrorist organization.

The White House worked closely with lawmakers to draft the sanctions bill, The Jerusalem Post reported, which received broad bi-partisan support. US President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill into law imminently.

“The president will sign this bill,” a senior administration official told The Jerusalem Post. “For many years we have worked with Congress to intensify the pressure against the Hezbollah terrorist organization, and we look forward to working closely with them in implementing these new authorities.”

President Obama gives an address at a naturalization ceremony for 31 immigrants on Dec. 15, 2015. (Photo: YouTube Screenshot)

At a Washington, DC ceremony naturalizing 31 new immigrants as US citizens on Tuesday, American President Barack Obama compared today’s Syrian refugees to Jewish Holocaust survivors after World War II.

Obama, who is battling opposition against his plan to settle thousands of refugees from war-torn Syria in the US, drew comparisons between modern and historical immigrant communities, urging the audience to see in the Mexican immigrant “the Catholic immigrant of a century ago”, and in the Syrian refugee “the Jewish refugee of World War II.”

He invoked America’s history of accepting immigrants and outsiders, saying, “In these new Americans, we should see our own American story.”

In a thinly veiled criticism of political opponents who have been outspoken against accepting Syrian refugees, Obama reminded the crowd of the US’s internment of Japanese citizens during the Second World War, and said that the country had then “succumbed to fear.”

He warned today’s Americans against making the same mistake today. “One generation passes, two generations pass, and suddenly we don’t remember where we came from,” he said. “We need to resolve never to repeat mistakes like that again.”

Obama is not the first to draw the comparison between Syrian and Jewish refugees. Many in recent weeks have made the argument that rejecting Syrian refugees is paramount to the US turning away Jewish refugees during World War II, though many others have furiously rejected the analogy.

Critics of the comparison have pointed out that unlike the Jews rejected by America during World War II, Syrian refugees are not fleeing imminent death, and that refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, while not boasting high-quality conditions, are simply not analogous to death camps like Auschwitz.

Others have noted that when Jews applied to the US for refuge in 1939, there was no established Jewish state which could have taken them in, whereas today, there are a considerable number of wealthy Arab states which have the potential, if not the desire, to take in Syrian refugees. Of course, no Arab state has shown any interest in doing so, and some have categorically refused.

Perhaps most persuasively, many have argued that refugee Jews did not represent any kind of terrorist threat to the US, whereas there is evidence that at least some of the Syrian refugees now seeking to settle in the US and Europe have been radicalized by violent Islamic groups like ISIS.

An Egyptian air force F-16 Fighting Falcon. (Photo: Staff Sgt. Amy Abbott/ U.S. Air Force)

In an unprecedented move, Egyptian aircraft have entered Israeli airspace while en route to attack ISIS affiliates in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on several occasions in recent months, Ynet revealed on Tuesday.

The fighter jets, which flew through Israel’s airspace in order to bomb ISIS targets in the El Arish and Sheikh Zuweid regions of the northern Sinai, likely did so with the knowledge and permission of the IDF, as the violations garnered no response from the military.

It is probably the first time since Egyptian fighter pilots flew into Israel as enemies during the 1973 Yom Kippur War that Egypt’s air force has entered Israeli airspace.

The flights mostly took place in the triangular border area between Israeli territory, Egyptian territory, and the southern Gaza Strip.

Israel first started to allow Egypt to enter the Sinai from Israel’s easternmost border about four years ago, when Islamist forces began to grow in strength and clashes with the Egyptian military in the region became more frequent. The permission was given in accord with the military clause of the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel.

The Egyptian forces have used this permission to strike terrorist targets in the area with fighter planes and helicopters. Some of their targets are located mere kilometers away from the Israeli border.

The ISIS-affiliated terror group in the Sinai is estimated to number at least 8,000 members, and is one of ISIS’s most effective offshoots in the Middle East, attacking Egyptian military forces almost daily and killing dozens of security forces monthly. In October, it claimed to have brought down a Russian airliner in the region.

The mode of operation for the Sinai-based ISIS group makes gathering intelligence on their actions and plans difficult, as it rarely uses phones or computers and acts more as a group of individual terror cells than as an organized force. Recently, the IDF and Israel’s intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, have begun to increase efforts to gather intelligence on the Egyptian border.

Read more at http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/56372/egyptian-fighter-jets-using-israeli-airspace-to-bomb-isis-idf/#CvKlw5EF1kRiRjlh.99

With the help of Santa, a city worker distributes Christmas trees outside of the Old City. (Photo: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

On Wednesday, the Jerusalem Municipality announced that it would distribute free Christmas trees in the city on Monday, December 21, continuing an annual tradition of giving out the festive trees, gifted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), to those celebrating the Christmas holiday in the holy land.

About 200 trees will be distributed at the Jaffa gate to the Old City, where the Christian Quarter is annually festooned with lights and decorations in honor of the holiday, between the hours of 9 am and 12 pm.

Every year, the JNF distributes Christmas trees to institutions celebrating the holiday, including churches, monasteries, convents, embassies, foreign journalists, and the general public.

According to the JNF, the trees used for Christmas trees are Arizona cypresses. Each JNF forest is divided into “stands” of trees identified by date of planting, tree type, and growth rate.

As Christmas approaches, Arizona cypress plots will undergo a process called “thinning”, in which Jewish National Fund foresters remove undergrowth, trimming tree tops and cutting down dead or diseased trees, in order to prevent forest fires from spreading and to encourage healthy growth in the forests.

The process also yields many beautiful and high-quality cypress trees to be used as part of a traditional Christmas celebration. As for lights, ornaments, and tinsel, holiday revelers are on their own – but decorations aren’t hard to find, especially at Christian sites like Nazareth and Bethlehem, where annual Christmas celebrations are held for thousands of visitors.

Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat also announced that he will be hosting the city’s annual New Year’s event for leaders and representatives of Israel’s different religious communities on January 21, in the municipality City Hall.

Report From Israel – Thursday, December 17, 2015

Report From Israel – Thursday, December 17, 2015