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Hamas accused Israel of being behind recent rumors of an imminent prisoner exchange, calling them “test balloons.”
Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak dismissed these same rumors and called them potentially “damaging.”
Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)
10:02PM: Wow.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy criticized Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman last week and told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he should “get rid of that man”.
Channel 2 reported Monday that during Netanyahu’s meeting with Sarkozy in Paris the latter said the prime minister should appoint Opposition chairwoman Tzipi Livni in Lieberman’s place. “With her and (Defense Minister Ehud) Barak you can make history”, he was quoted as saying.
“I have always accepted Israeli foreign ministers, and I loved to have Tzipi Livni here at the Elysee, but with (Lieberman) I can’t,” he was reported as saying with a wave of his hand.
When Netanyahu answered that “in private talks he sounds different” the French president reportedly replied, “In private talks Jean-Marie Le Pen is also a nice person.”
When the prime minister rejected the comparison to extreme rightist Le Pen Sarkozy reportedly agreed that the comparison was not a just one.
The Prime Minister’s Office stated to Ynet in response that “the prime minister does not react to the content of talks he holds, however he expresses his profound respect for the foreign minister”.
Lieberman’s public relations advisor, Tzahi Moshe, said Sarkozy’s comments against the foreign minister were “serious and intolerable”, as they constituted “the intervention of the president of a respected democratic country in the affairs of another democratic country”.
“We expect every political institution in Israel to condemn this blatant intervention of a foreign country in our private affairs, no matter what its political stance,” Moshe added.
8:45PM: Ha’aretz reports on a near miss.
A 27-year-old woman was seriously injured after driving her car off the third story of a parking lot at Jerusalem’s Malha shopping mall Monday.
An initial investigation found that the woman mistakenly went into reverse after becoming confused while driving in the parking lot.
The car fell from the third story and became stuck in a tree trunk below.
Sorry, I can’t resist.
8:10PM: After being stopped in Cyprus for a few days, the terror supporters of Free Gaza are now on their way to Gaza.
And they are seemingly not completely broke, since they could afford a website redesign, including this page for live updates (they may need to resolve some of those pesky technical difficulties, however, since according to their live map, the boat is somewhere off the coast of California).
Meanwhile, they’ve joined the Twitter bandwagon, with comments such as this:
We left this morning, one boat, 21 passengers, 20 olive trees, one symbolic bag of cement.
And this:
Working on it. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s update. It’s not over until the fat lady sings, and we have no one who is fat on board.
I take that as confirmation that Lauren Booth is not joining them this time.
1:40PM: Yet another example of anti-Israel activists who have no qualms about being loose with the truth.
A major Dutch promoter of boycotts against Israel was last week rebuked for misleading consumers by spreading messages which run “contrary to the truth,” according to a precedent ruling by Holland’s national advertising board.
The Advertising Code Committee recommended on Tuesday that the Amsterdam-based organization Peace – which describes itself as a consumer group – cease its current campaign against the sale of Israeli products.
Peace’s activities came under the committee’s scrutiny following a complaint by the Israel Products Center, a Netherlands-based online store specializing in Israeli goods. In February the center’s managers complained that a flier which Peace has been circulating has damaged them by targeting their livelihood and brand.
The flyer was circulated inside national and local newspapers. It called for a boycott of Israeli products from the West Bank, but also told readers about “wholesale fraud using false papers and labels” concerning the origin of Israeli products.
Critics of Peace’s campaign said that in so doing, Peace was in fact calling for a boycott of all Israeli products. The advertising committee found the campaign created the false impression that the Israel Products Center was engaged in illegal activity. Furthermore, the committee said Peace misled readers by suggesting that the sale of products from the West Bank was illegal.
