Today’s Top Stories
1. The Bashar Assad regime is gearing up for an offensive against Islamic State in the Palestinian Yarmouk refugee camp, the Jerusalem Post reports. Most of the camp’s residents fled for Lebanon as the Syrian civil war escalated, but some 18,000 Palestinians remain in Yarmouk, besieged and near starvation.
Will the Syrians drop leaflets or barrel bombs on the UNRWA-administered camp?
2. Israel’s bracing for expected retaliation from Iran. Diplomats abroad are on alert. Israel revealed more details about Iran’s deployment of forces in Syria. More on that at Ynet, i24 News and Israel HaYom.
Israeli defense officials said that the majority of Iran’s military support is delivered to Syria under the guise of humanitarian aid.
Since 2015, the Iranian Air Force has been conducting routine flights into Syria, using military cargo planes disguised as civilian Iranian airlines to transport weapons and combat personnel, including drone operators.
The Quds Force is said to be focused on establishing air defenses and drone operations in Syria, so it can use them to launch direct offensives against Israel.
Will Tehran’s threatened revenge overshadow Independence Day celebrations?
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
3. Haaretz and Ynet report that peacefully protesting Gazans have flown several firebomb-laden kites into Israel, sparking blazes in nearby kibbutzim. No injuries or significant damage reported but fire fighters are on alert.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Europe to Hamas: Relinquish armed struggle for five years (!?) and we’ll rebuild Gaza.
• The mayor of French city council who supports boycotts of Israel was blocked from entering Israel at the Allenby Bridge on Monday. Earlier this year, Gennevilliers Mayor Patrice Leclerc, of the French Communist Party, pushed a council resolution recognizing Palestinian statehood (subsequently rescinded under pressure).
Leclerc was also part of a French delegation barred from Israel after seeking to visit Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti and other security prisoners last year.
• An IDF source confirmed to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that Israel indeed was responsible for last week’s attack on the T4 air base in Syria, where Iranian aerial drones were reportedly kept.
“It was the first time we attacked live Iranian targets — both facilities and people,” said the Israeli military source. And the Iranians not only openly announced their embarrassing losses through the semiofficial Fars news agency — they have played down previous indirect casualties from Israeli strikes in Syria — but then publicly vowed to take revenge.
The rest of Friedman’s column is worth reading.
• Syria blames missile malfunction and false alarm on Israeli-US ‘joint electronic attack.’
• Israel’s new ambassador to Jordan took up his post in Amman closing the chapter on a months-long diplomatic row. Israeli-Jordanian relations nose-dived in July when a security guard shot and killed two Jordanians, one of whom was said to have attacked the guard. Amb. Amir Weissbrod replaces Einat Schlein.
• Ahead of the country’s 70th anniversary celebrations, here’s a by the numbers look at Israeli population figures released by the Central Bureau of Statistics.
– 8,842,000: current overall population
– 6,589,000: Jewish citizens
– 1,849,000: Arab citizens
– 404,000: citizens from other ethnic groups
– 177,000: babies born in past year
– 28,000: new immigrants in past year
– 41,000: Israelis who died in past year
– 1.9 percent: Population growth in past year
– 14,500,000: estimated number of Jews in world today
– 45: percentage of world Jewry now living in Israel
– 806,000: Israeli population in 1948
• One the eve of Yom HaZikaron, the New York Times visited the new National Memorial Hall for Israel’s fallen.
Around the World
• The New York Daily News reports that a group of American victims of Palestinian terror asked a New York court to take another look at their lawsuit against Facebook in light of Mark Zuckerberg recent testimony to Congress. Last year, a federal judge dismissed a pair of lawsuits against Facebook which argued that the social media giant was liable for allowing terror groups like Hamas to further their goals.
A year after a Brooklyn federal judge concluded Facebook couldn’t be on the hook for enabling Hamas attacks in Israel, the victims are insisting Zuckerberg’s two days of testimony put a whole new spin on the legal fight . . .
“It is clear from Zuckerberg’s testimony that Facebook takes an active role in forming the content appearing on its website,” attorney Robert Tolchin told the Second Circuit.
• Student government vote on Israel boycott resolution cancelled at George Washington U. over security concerns.
• NYU: Students’ pledge to boycott pro-Israel groups ‘is at odds with our values.’
Commentary
• Over at the Washington Post, Aaron David Miller and Steven Simon worry that partisanship is compromising US-Israel relations.
But the shattering of our shared image of Israel and its transformation into a political football — a shift that a changing Israel has encouraged — will ultimately diminish ourselves. Why? Because it deprives us of a communal symbol and shared value as our social cohesion is becoming increasingly frayed.
It is also dangerous. Alliances are most vulnerable when they are perceived to be weakening. And a United States divided regarding Israel might forgo intervention on its behalf in a crisis, in a way that could create doubts about American reliability while forsaking a solemn commitment to a people that had passed through the gas chambers and crematoria.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Alex Fishman: Syria strikes: Trump made the bed, now Israel must lie in it
– Noa Landau: Despite tensions over Syria attack, Israel’s line to the Kremlin remains open
– Ron Ben-Yishai: Israel can deal with Russian supply of S-300 missiles to Syria
– Chemi Shalev: 9 takeaways from the US Syria strike briefing, and an inconvenient truth for Israel
– Prof. Eytan Gilboa: ‘Sharp power’: Hamas’ dirty war against Israel
– Peter Lerner: The Gaza border — Israel’s White Cliffs of Dover
– Liel Leibovitz: The Gaza delusion
– Jonathan Goldstein, Jonathan Arkush: Corbyn needs to defend Labour MPs fighting antisemitism
– Karol Markowicz: Why we’re forgetting the Holocaust
Featured image: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90; Tel Aviv CC BY-NC-ND stttijn; Soleimani via Wikimedia Commons; Leclerc via YouTube/Regards; USA CC BY-SA HonestReporting;
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