Everything you need to know about today’s coverage of Israel and the Mideast. Join the Israel Daily News Stream on Facebook.
Today’s Top Stories
1. UN personnel investigating a Syrian chemical attack suspended their mission after coming under sniper fire. Sky News adds that two mortars landed near the UN team’s hotel.
How will Assad and his Russian apologists explain a reception like that?
2. The PA cancelled today’s peace talks in Jericho. An official quoted by AFP said the PA was protesting the death of three Palestinians during an IDF arrest raid in the Qalandiya refugee camp. The situation went awry “when over 1,500 Palestinians poured into the streets and attacked the officers with firebombs and rocks,” wrote YNet. Footage posted on YouTube showed Palestinians in the camp throwing rocks and rubble on an army jeep from the rooftops.
3. From Egypt to Iraq, the status of Mideast Christians has never looked gloomier, according to the Daily Telegraph, CNN, NPR, YNet, and Time.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post was in lockdown when angry Egyptian-Americans showed up at the paper’s headquarters:
The office’s main lobby was shut down and no one was allowed in or out during the approximately half hour that the protesters peacefully chanted and waved signs.
The protest appeared to include, among others, a large number of Coptic Christians, who make up about one-tenth of Egypt’s population and many of whom live in the District and neighboring suburbs. Some complained that the Post had not sufficiently covered the rash of mob violence against churches and Christian-owned businesses in Egypt since the July 3 military coup that removed President Mohamed Morsi.
Israel and the Palestinians
• A private Dutch company’s involvement in a Jerusalem sewage treatment plant is going down the drain, thanks to the EU’s settlement guidelines. Haaretz explains:
The Dutch government has asked the country’s largest engineering company to rethink its participation in a project with the Jerusalem municipality because the project is based on the Palestinian side of the 1967 border. Foreign Ministry officials fear that this will be a trend in Europe, not an isolated incident.
The project by Royal HaskoningDHV involves Israeli company Mati, a subsidiary of Hagihon, the municipality’s water and sewage company.
Royal HaskoningDHV, by the way, is a private company.
• The facts just don’t back up the urgency of AP‘s lead paragraph. You have to read on to find out that construction is years away, and that the government hasn’t given final approval to the project:
Israel pushed forward Sunday with plans to construct 1,500 apartments in east Jerusalem in a move that could undermine recently renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
• Worth reading: Deutsche Welle correspondent Tania Kramer’s dispatch from Gaza highlights Hamas desperation.
- Palestinians agree to hand over terror suspects to Lebanese authorities.
- American and Israeli commandos already operating in Syria?
- Israeli citizens clamor for gas mask kits.
