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United States Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft said on Wednesday that another Arab state could sign a peace deal with Israel within days.
“Our plan is to bring more countries, which we will have more being announced very soon,” Craft told the Al Arabiya news outlet. “Could be one in the next day or two,” she added.
Craft framed Israel’s normalization deals with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed earlier this month as crucial to countering the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Relatedly, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman called upon world leaders to confront Iranian nuclear aspirations as a united front and expressed support for US Middle East peace efforts.
In an address to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, Salman said: “Our experience with the Iranian regime has taught us that partial solutions or appeasement will not stop its threats to international peace and security. A comprehensive solution and a firm international position are required to ensure fundamental solutions to the Iranian regime’s attempt to obtain weapons of mass destruction and its ballistic missile program.”
In another possible move towards normalization, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sudan’s Sovereignty Council chair Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan are likely to meet in the coming days in Uganda.
It is reported that on Saturday, September 26, the Sudanese-Israeli Friendship Association will be inaugurated in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. At the event, a process leading to the establishment of relations between the two countries will be announced.
The first known direct commercial flight between Israel and Bahrain landed Wednesday in the island kingdom. Israir Airlines Airbus A320 touched down at Bahrain International Airport after a nearly three-hour flight from Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport.
It was later acknowledged that the flight carried a delegation of Israeli officials. “A working team from the state of Israel visited Manama today to discuss areas of cooperation between the two countries,” Bahrain said in a statement.
Israel is heading back into a complete lockdown, which will begin on Friday and is likely to last until at least the end of the High Holidays. After eight hours of deliberations, the coronavirus cabinet made its recommendations, which were brought to the full cabinet for a late-night vote. The government subsequently approved the stricter measures.
The lockdown will probably include the shuttering of synagogues, decreasing the number of people who are allowed to protest, closing all nonessential businesses and markets, reducing public transportation routes, and allowing citizens to only congregate with their nuclear families.
The decision was made on a day when almost 7,000 people were diagnosed with the coronavirus within a 24-hour period, a grim new record.
As doctors confront a surge in COVID-19 cases, with some patients waiting for hours in ambulances, the northern city of Haifa’s Rambam Health Care Campus is tackling the crisis by transforming its parking lot into a ward.
The car park was originally earmarked as a possible shelter after Israel’s 2006 conflict with the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.
And the economic repercussions from the decision to implement a second national lockdown last Friday became clearer on Wednesday. Newly released figures from the National Employment Service reveal that 110,000 people have registered for unemployment in the last six days. Over 28,000 of those were added in the past day alone.
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Antisemitism Watch: Organizers at San Francisco State University said they will livestream their videoconference with infamous Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled over Facebook, after the online communication platform Zoom moved to nix it.
The event was temporarily cancelled after the Lawfare Project, an NGO that defends human rights on behalf of Jewish and pro-Israel communities around the world, had complained to Zoom that Khaled is affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terror organization.
Khaled was part of a team that hijacked TWA Flight 840 on its way from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1969. A year later she participated in the attempted hijacking of an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York City, as part of a series of simultaneous hijackings carried out by the PFLP.
Khaled was arrested in London, where the pilot diverted the plane, and later released in exchange for hostages from another hijacking.
The world’s largest collection of Holy Land postcards has been donated to the Folklore Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies.
For over 60 years, David Pearlman – a London-based accountant by day and collector by night – searched auction houses, private collections and estate sales to piece together his Postcards of Palestine collection. It is the largest of its kind in the world, numbering 130,000 postcards.
When asked about his favorite postcard, Pearlman said, “I haven’t got a favorite postcard but it’s the whole collection that feels like part of my family. They’re all my favorites. It’s like touching a piece of history.”
A mixed martial arts and kickboxing champion from India is moving to Israel, and he plans to represent the Jewish state in international competition.
Obed Hrangchal, 26, who has won national medals in India in several martial arts, is religiously observant and a member of the Bnei Menashe Jewish community. He is set to immigrate with his parents and sister right after the High Holidays.
“I have always dreamt of making aliya to the Land of Israel and I am very excited at the prospect of doing so,” Hrangchal said in a statement released by Shavei Israel, an organization that helps lost communities of Jews or descendants of Jews to rediscover their roots and come to Israel.
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