Today’s Top Stories
1. A team of Israelis doing maintenance work on the border fence with Gaza came under fire this morning. The IDF returned fire, killing a Hamas commander, according to Israeli media reports. One soldier was seriously injured.
2. Do you get the feeling Mahmoud Abbas is painting himself into a corner with rhetoric like this?
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas threatened on Tuesday to sever all ties with Israel if the statehood resolution presented to the UN Security Council last week did not receive approval.
3. Hamas is definitely digging: Residents of Kibbutz Netiv Ha’asara told the Times of Israel they’ve spotted bulldozers, trucks, and even Hamas flags over mounds of dirt at tunnel excavation sites along the Gaza border.
4. If you’re in Jerusalem next week, join HonestReporting for an exclusive closed door briefing at our world headquarters as award-winning journalist Khaled Abu Toameh discusses “Reporting From the Other Side.”
Toameh, an Israeli-Arab news reporter for the Jerusalem Post, has covered Arab affairs for three decades, and received the 2014 Daniel Pearl Award for courage and integrity in journalism.
When: Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2014 (doors open at 6:15 pm, talk begins at 7.00 pm prompt)
Where: Heichal Shlomo Building, 58 King George St. (next door to the Great Synagogue)
Advance Registration required. Click here to book your tickets. (Registration closes Sunday, Dec. 29).
5. HonestReporting Radio: Palestinian Dreams? A troubling New York Times staff-editorial ignores the Israeli narrative. What does it say about the paper’s views? Click below to hear HonestReporting’s Yarden Frankl interview with the Voice of Israel.
Israel and the Palestinians
• UN Watch: The official line is that William Schabas and his team investigating this year’s Gaza war wants to hear from Israelis too. But the inquiry issued Arabic calls for submissions, but not Hebrew.
• A few days ago, the BBC’s director of television, Danny Cohen said he never felt more uncomfortable about rising levels of UK anti-Semitism. To which Jewish communal leader Jonathan Arkush responds:
“During the Gaza conflict last summer, sections of the media and society reacted to events in a manner that was so unbalanced that it left many British Jews feeling the same way as Danny Cohen. Ironically the BBC was part of the problem.”
Ties in nicely with our 2014 Dishonest Reporting Awards, which we announced yesterday. Read Why the Gaza War Correspondents Won.
• Haaretz: Israel is halting most gas-mask production and distribution due to decline in chemical weapon threat.
The decision to stop distributing gas masks to everyone except for first responders is controversial even within the defense establishment. Some military professionals deem this an unacceptably high risk, given fears that Syria still has a residual stock of chemical weapons.
• In case you missed it, Vice News has an excellent five-part series of videos on the Syrian civil war as seen through Israeli eyes. The last video was posted yesterday.
• Jewish organizations are furious with the European Parliament for not establishing a task force on anti-Semitism, as many expected. One activist explained to the Jerusalem Post why not to hold your breath waiting for the parliament to make nice:
Moreover, she said, another opportunity to establish such a task force will come only after the next European elections, meaning that for the next several years there will be no such body dealing directly with such issues.
• A French judge ordered a Paris suburb to take down a plaque honoring a Palestinian terrorist serving a life sentence for participating in the 2001 assassination of Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi. The JTA reports that the judge also invalidated the town council’s grant of honorary citizenship.
• ISIS captured a Jordanian pilot whose airplane went down while assisting coalition forces in an air strike in northeastern Syria. Mu’ath Safi Yousef al-Kaseasbeh becomes the first member of the US-led coalition forces taken captive by ISIS.
Commentary/Analysis
• For more commentary/analysis, see Raphael Ahren (Abbas’s UN gambit: capricious and possibly self-defeating), Marion Bernard (Israel’s terrorist, France’s “unbalanced individual”), Elliott Abrams (Gaza at year’s end), Burak Bekdil (Heading for a Jew-free Turkey), Shay Lev (What is the EU’s definition of terrorism?), and Ali Ibrahim (Media wars).
Featured image: CC BY flickr/regelzamora
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
