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IDF Brigadier-General Alon Friedman has told the Times of London that the relative calm up North of the past three years could “explode at any minute,” with Hizbullah stronger and better armed than it was in 2006. It has up to 40,000 rockets and is training its forces to use ground-to-ground missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv, not to mention anti-aircraft missiles.
Well done UNIFIL!
Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)
11:52PM: UNRWA continues to protect Hamas.
The security establishment had some scathing criticism for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) on Wednesday after the IDF claimed that three ambulances that were transferred to the organization some two weeks ago were seized by Hamas.
According to the army, a short time after the ambulances arrived in Gaza via the Kerem Shalom border crossing, Hamas gunmen overpowered the drivers and took control of the vehicles. The IDF noted that UNRWA failed to report the incident.
A military source told Army Radio that the incident indicated a double standard toward Hamas, and UNRWA’s discrimination concerning Israel.
“When Israel deviates a little from procedures in Gaza, there is a massive world outcry, but when UNRWA, as an organization, doesn’t even declare that Hamas is causing great damage in Gaza, the world doesn’t even open its mouth,” he said.
Furthermore, other sources pointed out that Hamas’s control of Gaza was causing UNRWA great distress, and that the agency’s director-general had recently received death threats, reportedly prompting him to flee the Strip.
An UNRWA spokesman said that he was not familiar with the alleged ambulance seizures and that the report was being checked.
11:32PM: Beware the Zionist Death Horses.TM
Video: Horse tramples car in Israel
The driver of this car had a lucky escape after a horse galloped over his vehicle, smashing the windscreen with its hooves and denting the bonnet and roof.
The dramatic footage was taken in northern Israel by tourists who had been filming a group of horses galloping along a highway, when one ploughed into an oncoming vehicle.
The driver of the car escaped with minor cuts and the horse only suffered light injuries in the head-on collision, according to a local newspaper.
11:26PM: From the Department of Delusional Thinking:
“There is life in the Labor party. Let’s roll up our sleeves. It is within our power to return Labor to leading the country,” Chairman Ehud Barak said Wednesday evening during the party’s convention.
“We plan on winning the next elections out of will power and the correct way. No one will teach us what it means to be committed to the State. The party lives. The old charter was not appropriate. We must not be afraid of changes,” he said.
See the 6:08AM update for more nonsense from our Defense Minister.
9:00PM: Today it was reported that a retired senior Defense Ministry official allegedly raped and defrauded women for 15 years, claiming to be a rabbi who could cure their problems.
The website of Hamas, who claim they are not anti-Semitic (just anti-Zionist), reported the story as follows:
Misleading headline to insinuate the perpetrator of these heinous acts was a Jewish religious leader? Check.
Accompanying photograph of a rabbi totally unrelated to the story? Check.
No anti-Semitism here. Move along.
4:00PM: PMW brings to our attention some more disturbing scenes from our “peace partners.”
Fatah leaders responded with loud applause when two terrorists who committed the worst terror attack in Israel’s history were referred to as “heroic Martyrs” by former PA Prime Minister Abu Alaa, at the opening ceremony of Fatah’s Sixth General Conference:
“We have in our midst the hero Khaled Abu-Usbah, hero of the operation [terror attack] led by the Shahida (Martyr) Dalal Mughrabi [loud applause from the audience]. We salute him and welcome him. And [we salute] the hero, the Shahida (Martyr) Dalal. [He shouts:] All the glory! All the glory! All the glory! All the sisters here are Dalal’s sisters.”
2:05PM: With Barack Obama largely basing his diplomatic approach to the Middle East on the Saudi peace plan, itis important to see how the Saudis view things:
Saudi King Abdullah has told Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas that the split within the Palestinians’ ranks is more damaging to their cause of an independent state than the Israeli “enemy.”
In a letter to Abbas marking his Fatah party’s first congress in 20 years, the Saudi king stressed that all Palestinian factions need to come together to make an independent Palestinian state possible.
“The arrogant and criminal enemy was not able, during years of continued aggression, to hurt the Palestinian cause as much as the Palestinians hurt their cause themselves in the past few months,” Abdullah said in the letter released through the official SPA news agency late Tuesday.
“I can honestly tell you, brothers, that even if the whole world joins to found a Palestinian independent state, and if we have full support for that, this state would not be established as long as the Palestinians are divided.
“This letter from the holy land does not represent my sentiments alone but the sentiments of one thousand million Arabs and Muslims who see their greatest issue is the Palestinian issue.”
Saudi Arabia’s King bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud warned on Tuesday Arab and the Muslim nations vis a vis the Palestine question which he described “as currently on the verge of entering a dark tunnel.” The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques made his remark in a cable he sent to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and members of the 6th Fatah Movement Conference.
The monarch recalled that “late President Yasser Arafat’s (Fatah movement leader) had triggered the Arab and Muslim national spirit of steadfastness and resistance.” In this regard, the King pointed out that Fatah was a symbol of Palestine, and called on Palestinian leaders and individuals to beware of differences and hatred among themselves.
In other words, the US President (and some in Israel) are placing stock in a plan put forward by people who view Israel as the enemy, support terrorism, and are not interested in peace but rather only that the palestinians get a state.
1:47PM: A 21-year-old IDF soldier has been killed and three others lightly wounded after their Merkava tank overturned during a training accident in the Golan Heights.
More on the soldier:
The soldier, 21-year-old Uriel Peretz Lebrant of Efrat, came from an American family. He was a hesder yeshiva student at Yeshivat Har Etzion in Alon Shvut.
“Uriel personified gentleness and at the same time readiness to lead, as he showed as the commander of his tank,” said Rabbi Yaakov Fischer, head of Neveh Shmuel Yesihva High School in Efrat, where Lebrant studied.
I’m willing to bet fellow Efrat resident David knows the family.
8:55AM: Two pro-Israel American organizations and the Republican Jewish Coalition have lashed out at US President Barack Obama for awarding a Presidential Medal of Freedom to anti-Israel “human rights” campaigner Mary Robinson.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) called on the administration to “firmly, fully and publicly repudiate her views on Israel and her long public record of hostility and one-sided bias against the Jewish state.”
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) also condemned the decision to award former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The ZOA pointed out that both Tutu and Robinson “have made statements and presided over organizations and conferences that were viciously critical of Israel.” ZOA’s National President Morton A. Klein said, “It is deplorable that President Obama should have honored two such utterly partisan, vociferously anti-Israel figures like Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu.”
Klein noted that human rights groups are continuously being controlled by figures that are anti-Israel. He added, “Neither Robinson nor Tutu ever resigned in protest at the direction these bodies have taken, or took anything that could be called a courageous stand in favor of truth. Rather, both have lent their reputations to travesties of the truth and given the bodies on which they served an aura of undeserved legitimacy. By awarding them the Medal of Freedom, President Obama compounds their offense by lending them further underserved legitimacy.”
Republican Jewish Coalition Executive Director Matt Brooks said, “Mary Robinson, who was one of the people responsible for the 2001 Durban conference against racism descending into an anti-Israel propaganda forum, is not an appropriate recipient for one of our nation’s highest honors. In fact, awarding the Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson does great dishonor to the many outstanding men and women who have received it in the past.”
Robinson is widely known for the high-profile role she played in leading in what AIPAC calls “the deeply flawed” U.N. Human Rights Commission and for presiding over the U.N.’s Durban Conference on Racism, which the United States boycotted for “its unprecedented hostility to Israel” and its final outcome document that equated Zionism with racism.
In a BBC interview following the passage of the “Zionism = Racism” Durban text, Robinson described the outcome as “remarkably good, including on the issues of the Middle East.”
In April 2002, Robinson’s Human Rights Commission voted on a decision that condoned suicide bombings as a legitimate means to establish Palestinian statehood after Robinson initiated a drive to become a fact finder to investigate the fictitious massacre in Jenin.
Desmond Tutu has claimed that Zionism has “very many parallels with racism” and has called Jews “arrogant. Tutu accused Jews of exhibiting “an arrogance – the arrogance of power because Jews are a powerful lobby in this land and all kinds of people woo their support.”
And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson
“Jesus” loves you more than you will know (Wo, wo, wo)
God curse you please, Mrs. Robinson
You uphold the anti-Israel way
(Hey, hey, hey…hey, hey, hey) *
*sung to the tune of Mrs Robinson
6:20AM: Israel’s defence establishment recommends handing over Ghajar.
Before you get excited, I am referring to a village located on the Lebanon border, not this annoying creature:
6:08AM: We can blame the policies and approach of the US, and even more specifically the Obama administration, all we like. But the truth is we would not be in the bother we are in now had we had real leaders.Not people like this:
The US will unveil its plan for peace in the Middle East in the coming weeks, according to Defense Minister Ehud Barak, stressing his opinion that Israel should back the proposal.
“In the coming weeks,” Barak told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday, “the Americans will conclude their meetings with the various sides in the region and will formulate their position. Afterwards, they will present their plan for a regional peace. I believe that Israel must join in on the up-swing.”
