Today’s Top Stories
1. Palestinians tried to attack Israeli Supreme Court Justice David Mintz near his home in the West Bank settlement of Dolev. According to Haaretz:
Mintz told police that the assailants blocked his car with their vehicle, and came toward him carrying hammers. He then fled the scene. The justice was not injured, and no damage was done.
It’s not clear if the Palestinians knew who Mintz was.
2. A Palestinian was killed trying to stab a soldier at a West Bank this afternoon. No Israelis were injured. The incident, which took place at a bus stop between the Ariel settlement and the Barkan Industrial Park, is the third Palestinian terror attack in eight days.
Last week, two Israelis were killed when a Palestinian employee killed workers in that industrial park; two days later, two Israelis were wounded in a stabbing attack outside a northern West Bank army base.
3. Israel completed a 12 km stretch of a security barrier along the Lebanese border.
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Israel and the Palestinians
• IDF aircraft struck a Gaza cell launching incendiary balloons on Sunday. More at Ynet.
• As expected, the High Court of Justice froze the deportation BDS activist Lara Alqasem consider her appeal after a lower court ruled against her. The 22-year-old obtained a student visa from the Israeli consulate in Miami and was accepted into a graduate studies program at Hebrew University. She is free to leave Israel, but is staying in a holding facility at Ben Gurion Airport while she wages a legal battle.
• UNRWA, the cash-strapped UN agency for Palestinian refugees, has a cushy job opening. It’s looking for a director of external relations and is offering a $100,000 salary along with various nice benefits. Per the Jerusalem Post:
The position that UNRWA is advertising pays over 14 times average annual income for a Palestinian in 2017, $6960.
• Drip drip drip: Tamar Zandberg, leader of Israel’s left-wing Meretz party, denied meeting UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Zandberg’s original tweet is in Hebrew.
Jeremy Corbyn is so disliked in Israel that even the leader of the Left-wing Meretz party rushes to say she has never met with him: https://t.co/pB8hgzxfAN
— Raf Sanchez (@rafsanchez) October 15, 2018
• The Quneitra border crossing between Israel and Syria opened for first time in four years. It’s only used by UN observers, but it’s hoped that Druze citizens in Israel will eventually be able to use it to visit relatives on the Syrian side.
International peacekeepers were forced to evacuate their posts in 2014 when Islamist rebels captured the Syrian side of the border. A number of monitors got out in a dramatic IDF rescue.
• Israel HaYom: Israel will open an embassy in the Rwandan in 2019.
• New York police charged Farrukh Afzal with assault as a hate crime after he was caught on video beating up an elderly Orthodox Jewish man. The victim, 62-year-old Lipa Schwartz, said that Afzal spoke another language and that the only words he understood were “Israel” and “Allah.”
Commentary
• Michele Chabin pretty much summed up my thoughts on Jackson Diehl‘s latest column.
To say that Israel and Saudi Arabia have been destabilizing the Middle East while not even mentioning the role Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia and the Palestinians are playing is the height of tunnel vision and bias. https://t.co/A2uuZx18yg
— Michele Chabin (@MicheleChabin1) October 15, 2018
• Here’s what else I’m reading today:
– Yossi Yehoshua: An escalation at the Gaza border
– Yoni Ben Menachem: Hamas probes Israel’s defenses
– David Makovsky: Why Mahmoud Abbas thinks he’s beating Trump — and Israel
– Ariel Ben Solomon: Israel ties warming with Central Asian countries
– Zalman Shoval: If not UNRWA, there would be no Palestinian refugee problem
– Norman Bailey: The US elections and Israel
Featured image: CC BY Jon S; Mintz via Wikimedia Commons; Mt. Bisoke via Wikimedia Commons;
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