Today’s Top Stories
1. Seven people were injured in a drive-by shooting attack at the entrance to the West Bank settlement of Ofra. The most seriously hurt was 21-year-old woman in the 30th week of her pregnancy; doctors at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital delivered the baby by Cesarean section. Both are fighting for their lives.
Israeli security forces launched a manhunt; last night, Palestinians clashed with soldiers searching the nearby town of Silwad.
2. The IDF warned residents of two Lebanese border villages to temporarily leave their homes.
“Hezbollah built terror tunnels under Kfar Kila and Ramiyeh that infiltrate into Israeli territory, making the area a barrel of explosives,” read a Twitter post by the IDF’s spokesperson for Arabic media, Maj. Avichay Adraee. “We are determined to neutralize these tunnels, and we do not know the outcome of these actions on the relevant buildings on the Lebanese side.
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3. The JCPA released a study on PA terror stipends in 2018. You can skim through the numbers yourself, but I consider this the, uh, money quote.
Dedicating around $340 million to arrested Palestinian terrorists and “martyrs,” which forms 7 percent of the overall annual budget for 2018, reflects the prominence the Palestinian Authority and its leadership give to incentivizing terror. Palestinian law considers terrorists as the “fighting sector of Palestinian society.” As U.S. and Israeli pressure increases on the Palestinian Authority to cease paying these incentives and revoke the law upon which they are paid, Mahmoud Abbas has insisted repeatedly that he will not do so. “Even if we are left with one penny, we are going to use it for paying the salaries to the Martyrs and prisoners of war,” he declared.
These details also refute once more the occasional Palestinian claims that the payments of salaries to the terrorists are a sort of welfare. It is evident that welfare payments are paid separately and are far smaller than the salaries and other benefits paid to the arrested terrorists.
In the News
• Here’s why UNIFIL is destined to remain toothless: If UNIFIL’s mandate were expanded from “monitoring” the Israeli-Lebanese border to actively stopping Hezbollah tunneling, few countries would volunteer personnel for that mission, the Jerusalem Post reports.
• Mahmoud Abbas said he intends to dissolve the Palestinian parliament, which anyway hasn’t met in 10 years.
To put the PA's pace of change in perspective, the Columbia glacier has retreated approx 6 km (3.7 miles) since last time the Palestinian Legislative Council last met a decade ago. https://t.co/dKBOvZD0qa pic.twitter.com/1qQHk3Hukk
— Pesach Benson (@PesachBenson) December 10, 2018
• Netanyahu: El Al has permission to fly in Oman’s air space. It’s a welcome development, but until the Israeli airline gets permission to cross Saudi skies, don’t hold your breath waiting for shorter El Al flights to India.
• The Defense Ministry declared de-mining complete in three church compounds in Qasr al-Yahud. Sappers working for the the UK-based HALO Trust have been clearing out mines, booby traps and other unexploded ordinance. The holy site along the Jordan River is where Christians believe Jesus was baptized. It’s also thought by some as the location where the Jews entered the Holy Land after leaving Egypt and where the prophet Elijah ascended to heaven in fiery chariot.
Four other compounds still require de-mining, a job that expected to take months. Here’s a by the numbers look at the holy site based on visits by the Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and The Guardian.
– 6,500: estimated number of landmines and booby traps laid by Israeli and Jordanian forces over the years
– 100,000: square meters of land being de-mined
– 1,500: landmines cleared so far
– 22: sappers cleaning out the site
– 50: years the churches have been abandoned
– $10: cost of laying a mine
– $2,000: cost of removing a mine
– $2.6 million: donations to the HALO Trust for de-mining the site
– $2 million: Israeli government funding for de-mining the site
– 800,000: current annual visitors to Qasr-al-Yahud
– 2.4 million: expected annual visitors to Qasr-al-Yahud after de-mining
• The Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel picked up on a European Union report which found “nearly 90 percent of European Jews feel that anti-Semitism has increased in their home countries over the past five years.”
Thirty-eight percent said they had considered emigrating because they did not feel safe as Jews.
• Pittsburgh police are investigating antisemitic pamphlets in found in Squirrel Hill and other neighborhoods.
Commentary
• Marking the anniversary of President Donald Trump’s Jerusalem declaration, Michael Goodwin notes that the world hasn’t fallen apart over the recognition of the city’s capital status:
Ho-hum. It’s a year later and the sky still refuses to fall. Nor is the Mideast burning.
In fact, little or nothing has changed between the parties as a result of the announcement and the subsequent embassy move from Tel Aviv. There was no peace process at the time because the Palestinians had refused even to negotiate, and that remains the case.
• Here are other commentaries I’m reading today:
– Prof. Eyal Zisser: Stop playing into Hezbollah’s hands
– Ruthie Blum: Tunnel vision and UNIFIL
– Jonathan Tobin: Hezbollah’s war on Israel takes precedence over Bibi
– Pinhas Inbari: Will Hamas challenge Fatah in the West Bank?
– Shimrit Meir: The optics of Qatar’s cash infusion to Gaza
Featured image: CC BY-NC Thomas Hawk;
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