Today’s Top Stories
1. An 18-year-old Israeli was stabbed to death by a Palestinian at a gas station on Route 443, near the central Israeli city of Modiin.
2. The UN General Assembly has 20 anti-Israel resolutions in the pipeline to be discussed and voted on this coming Monday:
Twenty resolutions are to be proposed at the meeting, including ones calling for the Palestinian right of return, placing responsibility for terror on Israel while disregarding the terrorism in Israel in recent weeks, and accusing Israel of changing the status quo at the Temple Mount compound.
3. For the first time, Russian ground forces in Syria have engaged rebels, according to Arab media reports. Russian infantry forces are said to have captured a strategic peak near the coastal town of Latakia.
President Vladimir Putin further threw his weight around with a visit to Iran. The day’s main developments? Putin lifted a ban on Russian companies working at Iranian enrichment facilities, and approved a deal to transfer the S-300 long-range surface-to-air missiles.
4. Media’s Confused Headlines: Equating Terrorists With Victims: When terrorists get equal or even greater deference than their victims, editors need to check their moral compasses.
5. HonestReporting’s mission to Israel wrapped up today. Participants heard from IDF Col. (res.) Ben-Tzion Gruber about ethics on the battlefield, Palestinian Media Watch’s Itamar Marcus about incitement, Michelle Rojas-Tal of StandWithUs about the campus battle for Israel, while Neil Lazarus provided practical advocacy tips.
Learn more about HonestReporting’s missions to Israel.
Israel and the Intifada
• This afternoon, two Palestinian teenage girls who tried to stab Israelis at Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market were shot. In the end, the teen terrorists injured a 70-year-old Palestinian man, while a security guard was apparently injured by a ricochet bullet. YNet has footage from the incident.
Earlier in the day, an 18-year-old Israeli was lightly injured in a suspected Palestinian hit and run attack near the northern West Bank settlement of Homesh.
• Israeli terror victim Hadar Buchris was laid to rest in Safed today.
• Hamas and Fatah are threatening Gershon Mesika, the ex-settler leader who foiled a terror attack yesterday when he ran over Ashraqat Katnani, a Palestinian teenager trying to stab Israelis at the Hawara checkpoint, near Nablus. This inciting image was posted on Fatah’s official Twitter feed.
While the PA was claiming that Israel planted a knife on Katnani, her father proudly told Palestinian media that Ashraqat said she wanted to die a martyr and described her search for the best knife in the house. More on that angle at the Jerusalem Post.
• Worth reading: Times of Israel reporter Judah Ari Gross was interviewing an IDF spokesman at the Gush Etzion Junction when Hadar Buchris was stabbed. Gross describes the scene and frankly describes the difficulties of securing the intersection.
Meanwhile, The Media Line‘s Noga Tarnopolsky takes the pulse of co-existence in the Gush with a visit to a supermarket at the junction, where Jews and Arabs work together.
• With 22 people killed and 192 wounded in two months of terror, YNet looks at the intifada’s human cost.
• Oh no, Jacob Zuma! South African president links Paris attacks to Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“All these attacks, wherever they occur, put the spotlight on the Middle East peace process,” he said. “It is difficult to imagine peace in the world without the achievement of peace in the Middle East. South Africa continues to contribute to attempts at finding peace in the Middle East especially with the age-old Palestinian-Israeli question.”
• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s pushing to strip citizenship from Israelis trying to join Islamic State.
Israeli authorities say about 45 Israeli Arabs have joined the ranks of IS in recent months, with some having been killed.
• Struggling to pay the salaries of 40,000 civil servants in Gaza, Hamas announced it will distribute plots of land from former Israeli settlements that were vacated during the 2005 disengagement.
Many say the move is corrupt, based on political discrimination and clearly benefits most those who are closer with the terror group’s top echelon.
• Gaza rocket lands in open area in southern Israel
Around the World
• Britain’s Labor Party voted to boycott the G4S security company over its business with Israel. According to the Jewish Chronicle, the party’s national executive committee made this decision last week. G4S has provided security at party conferences for several years.
It is also believed that the majority of the NEC’s 33 members had already left the meeting, including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and deputy leader Tom Watson.
• New York Observer: Avis Car Rental reportedly bars Israeli executive from renting.
• The Washington Post takes an in-depth look at the Islamic State’s video apparatus, “the most potent propaganda machine ever assembled by a terrorist group.” Reporters Greg Miller and Souad Mekhennet talked to former IS camera men who fell out of favor with jihadist leaders, defected, and are now imprisoned in Morocco.
What they described resembles a medieval reality show. Camera crews fan out across the caliphate every day, their ubiquitous presence distorting the events they purportedly document. Battle scenes and public beheadings are so scripted and staged that fighters and executioners often perform multiple takes and read their lines from cue cards.
Commentary/Analysis
• A New York Times staff-ed comes out against special treatment to ease the conditions of Jonathan Pollard’s parole.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Uri Heitner: The terrorism of delegitimization
– Jonathan Alter: Middle East peace isn’t quite dead yet
– Ilan Troen: Academic boycott? Palestinians benefit from cooperation with Israel
– Eyal Zisser: Don’t forget Iran
– Elliott Abrams: Are some terror victims more innocent than others?
– Michael Totten: Belgium terrorizes itself
– Jacques Neriah: Are there any moderate rebels in Syria?
Image: CC BY-NC-SA flickr/A bloke called Jerm; Corbyn via YouTube/BBC News;
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