Israel and the Palestinians
• Norwegian Cruise Lines cancelled all it port calls to Tunisia. This comes after Tunisia refused to allow 20 some Israeli passengers to disembark at the port of La Goullette on Sunday.
• Israel regrets death of Jordanian judge killed at the Allenby Bridge, agrees to joint investigation. More at CNN.
• Southern Israel battered by dozens of Gaza rockets. No reports of casualties; IDF tanks fired on launchers and Iron Dome took out three of the rockets.
• Israeli police arrested a Palestinian who nearly killed a number of people by sabotaging cooking gas lines in residential buildings in Jerusalem. According to the Jerusalem Post:
A massive gas explosion was narrowly averted last week after residents of Armon Hanatziv reported high concentrations of leaking gas and subsequently discovered two deliberately severed gas lines to their building, police said.
• Haaretz picks up on the continuing war between Australian reporter John Lyons and the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. Their battle — over Lyons’ flawed investigation of the IDF’s treatment of Palestinian children — turned ugly when Lyons launched a broadside at AIJAC with a column in The Australian (via Google News).
Fellow Aussie journalist Greg Sheridan took the unusual step of personally debunking his colleague’s report (click via Google News).
• For more commentary/analysis, see Yossi Beilin (recognizing Israel as a Jewish state). NPR discussed the same issue with Ari Shavit and Shibley Telhami.
Iranian Atomic Urgency
• Iran weapons ship causes greater stir in Arab world than West
• There’s a Chinese connection to the Klos-C noted by an astute Nahum Barnea:
First of all, the ship’s weapons containers were locked with lead seals of two types: Iranian seals and Chinese seals. Colonel Assaf, an Intelligence Directorate official who presented the containers, explained that the seals which had the Chinese code engraved on them were also locked in Iran. I warned him that China was one of the prime minister’s priorities at the moment. He understood the warning. When he presented the containers, he said politely: “Iran and another country.”
Moreover, the M-302 rockets, the more significant catch in the ship, are Chinese rockets. They were manufactured in Syria with Chinese approval.
• For more commentary/analysis, see Lee Smith (how Israel lost the media war but blocked an Iranian info campaign).
Arab Spring Winter
• Uh-oh. Syrian Islamists may have already gotten their hands on some of Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons. The Times of London writes:
Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a chemical weapons expert and former commanding officer of Britain’s Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, said there was a “wide and fairly deep body of evidence that would suggest some of the AQ [al-Qaeda] groups and others have possessed them”. . .
The SecureBio analysis cited reports of 20 lorries carrying chemical weapons material entering Iraq from Syria after the Ghouta gas attack. Colonel de Bretton-Gordon said that there was also evidence of rebels fighting the Assad regime using improvised chemical weapons, such as pesticides, which have the same chemical structure as a nerve agent.
• Thumbs up to the Christian Science Monitor for using the Klos-C as a hook to shed light on Syria’s secretive rocket industry.
• Support for Hezbollah in the Dahiyeh neighborhood of Beirut — the organization’s home base — is starting to erode, reports the Wall St. Journal (via Google News).
“In 2006, life was hard, I even had to close my shops. But I sacrificed for Israel, not fighting Syrians,” said Khaled, a barber who says business has dropped 50% since Dahiyeh became the target of bombings and missile strikes. He now has to borrow money to pay for rent and food, he said.
• Are the Saudis about to ban Al-Jazeera?
• For more commentary/analysis see the NY Daily News, where Jonathan Spyer and Benjamin Weinthal assess the shifting threats along Israel’s northern border.
(Image of Gould via Facebook/UK in Israel, Lyons via ABC News, skull via Wikimedia Commons)
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
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