Today’s Top Stories
1. Israel shut down the Erez and Kerem Shalom border crossings with Gaza after a Palestinian rocket was fired on Friday. The Rafah border crossing with Egypt was already closed as the Egyptians worked on a buffer zone. Media reports say Egypt discovered hundreds of tunnels leading into Sinai.
According to a report on Sky News Arabic on Saturday, Cairo recently uncovered the tunnels using satellite imagery.
2. Hamas is still producing rockets. The Times of Israel also fills in more details about the Hamas connection to Sinai terror:
The Egyptians and Israelis have intelligence that Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, the organization responsible for a number of serious attacks against the Egyptian Army, is being helped by known Hamas operatives.
In addition, there is a permanent presence of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis terrorists within Gaza who are providing Sinai jihadists with weapons and training.
3. ISIS is raising up child soldiers — some as young as six.
They stand in the front row at public beheadings and crucifixions held in Raqqa, the Islamic State’s stronghold in Syria. They’re used for blood transfusions when Islamic State fighters are injured. They are paid to inform on people who are disloyal or speak out against the Islamic State. They are trained to become suicide bombers. They are children as young as 6 years old, and they are being transformed into the Islamic State’s soldiers of the future.
Oh yeah: Hezbollah’s indoctrinating kids too.
4. Stories I’d Like to See: Background on the Temple Mount Troubles: The Temple Mount’s complex backstory has a bearing on today’s tensions. Here are some questions reporters should be raising.
5. Will the BDS End Campaign Against SodaStream? Don’t Bet on It: SodaStream is relocating out of the West Bank. Why is the boycott movement still battling the bubbles?
6. Dumb Edit of the Day: Jews and the Al-Aqsa Mosque: One editor really blew the story.
7. Vote for This Year’s Dishonest Reporting Award: It’s that time of the year. Nominate this year’s worst news service or journalist and make your voice heard.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Two Palestinian minors were indicted for trying to carry out a suicide bombing at a military court house in the West Bank. More at the Jerusalem Post:
Although the indictment was filed last week, the Post’s report is the first disclosure of the plot that is sending ripples through the defense establishment in terms of the audacity of the plan and the young age of the would-be suicide bombers.
• Kerry called Bibi to apologize for the chickenshit interview
• Peruvian police foiled a Hezbollah plot to attack Israeli and Jewish targets in the South American country.
• Canada won’t let BDS get in its way, says top academic.
• Asked about so-called “Israeli apartheid,” cabinet minister Naftali Bennett teed off on Sky News‘s Sam Kiley.
Commentary/Analysis
• Elliott Abrams on the chickensh*t fallout:
Those remarks made a bad situation among our allies far worse. That’s not because they like Netanyahu, but because it suggests that administration officials are callow, undisciplined, and untrustworthy. After all, those remarks were made with the intention that they be published; they were not off the record. The speakers (and there was more than one) obviously thought that in the Obama administration, trashing allied leaders in the press is fine and people above you will just chuckle; anyway, you are reflecting their views. Those remarks were not acts of rebellion nor leaks against administration policy. The officials who made those remarks did serious damage to U.S. credibility, and not just in Israel. That no one was punished, that no one was fired, is a signal that the whole situation is not being taken seriously. Which is one reason why, more and more, and very dangerously, American foreign policy is not being taken seriously.
• Weighing in on the chickensh*t interview and its significance for Israel-US relations are Ben-Dror Yemini and staff-eds in the Washington Post, Wall St. Journal (click via Google News), and a different take by the New York Jewish Week.
• For more commentary/analysis, see Melanie Phillips (The academic intifada), Ron Ben-Yishai (How to prevent a religious war in the Mideast), David Stavrou (Why Sweden recognized Palestine), Akiva Shapiro (Ask the Supreme Court if Jerusalem is in Israel — Wall St. Journal via Google News), Michael Burleigh (A Qatari assist for Islamic terror),
Rest O’ the Roundup
• The Syrian civil war is becoming a grinding war of attrition for Hezbollah. Hussain Abdul-Hussain looks at the numbers to explain why:
Today, there is hardly a Shiite village that has not lost a dozen or more of its men. Sooner or later, Hezobllah will run out of men to recruit, which will pose a serious problem for the party.
Perhaps in Iran, where almost every one of the 70 million is Shiite, numbers do not matter. But they do in Lebanon, where at one million, the Shiites form a quarter of the population. In Syria, the Alawites, who are not Shiites, number two million out of 16 million Syrians. The number of Shiites in Syria is statistically insignificant . . .
The disparity in numbers that clearly favors the Sunnis in the Levant is beginning to catch up with Hezbollah, despite its superior military capabilities. Hezbollah finds itself exhausted and bruised, and there seems to be no end in sight.
• A Knesset committee is due to vote on a bill that would ban free newspapers Israel HaYom. The bill is ostensibly about protecting the print newspaper industry. Details at the Jerusalem Post.
Featured image: CC BY flickr/internets_dairy, scouts via YouTube/Resistance 313
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