Last chance in Rio

Israel’s rhythmic gymnastics team hasn’t won a medal yet, but it’s already won two days worth of front pages in the Hebrew newspapers as the sun sets on the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. The tabloids also report on a father killed in southern Israel saving his daughter from being hit by a car.

The gymnastics final might only be Sunday night, but the press is all over the qualifying round, with Israel Hayom elated that the ladies competed to the Omer Adam and Moshe Peretz song “She just wants to dance.” Yedioth Ahronoth stakes its hopes for another Israeli medal at the Olympics on the rhythmic gymnasts, even though they came in sixth in the qualifying round. While a photo of the gymnasts runs on the front page of Haaretz, the paper cares far more about what’s happening at home, keeping the sports in the sports page.

To be perfectly fair, which the papers aren’t, there are other Israeli athletes competing on Sunday, the last day of the Rio games. The newspapers just don’t think they have a chance.

But for lack of much else to report on, the ongoing orgy of violence on Israeli roads makes headlines in Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth. One of the seven serious accidents grabs the attention of the papers more than others after Zamir Yona, 47, saved his daughter from an oncoming vehicle and was struck dead by it instead. The man’s heroism, and final cry of warning, “Baby, look out!” is the making of Yedioth Ahronoth’s headline. The paper also highlights another accident in which a six-year-old boy was hit by a car whose driver didn’t have a license, right in front of his twin brother’s eyes. A report summarized by the paper found that nearly half of Israeli teens admitted to having driven at least once without a license.

“The carnage on the roads doesn’t stop,” Israel Hayom comments in its coverage, assigning blame to some mysterious force behind car accidents.

The social issue of the day on Haaretz’s agenda is the cost of electricity, which it points out hasn’t gone down despite the fact that production costs have. The Israel Electric Corporation posted 14% profits in the first half of the year, and there are some who are even pushing to raise prices to increase profits, the paper reports. Part of the healthy profit margins stem from the company’s reduced use of coal in favor of cheaper natural gas and oil. Since reducing electricity rates in September 2015 by 6%, the paper says, there’s been no readjustment of prices to account for the reduced cost of fuel.

Haaretz bemoans the state of Israel’s Foreign Ministry with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the helm while simultaneously running the government and holding two other ministerial portfolios. “Without a full time foreign minister, the Foreign Ministry is deteriorating,” the paper’s Sunday editorial says. Foreign Ministry staff complain about the two people running the show, Director General Dore Gold and Chief of Staff Shimon Shapira, and “claim that the two prefer to hang out with Netanyahu, instead of attending to the issues of the ministry.” To solve growing discontent, Gold simply ordered Foreign Ministry workers not to talk to the press, a move the paper calls “both ridiculous and infuriating.”

“Gold’s directive reflects the contempt of Netanyahu and his people for the Foreign Ministry’s personnel. The latter are constantly suspected of disloyalty, and it is therefore ostensibly legitimate to continue undermining the ministry’s powers and transferring them to other ministries,” it writes.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is again the focus of Boaz Bismuth’s attention in his Israel Hayom op-ed. In his roundup about how Trump has been trailing in the polls all month, and how he’s now rebranding himself in a bid to kickstart his campaign, Bismuth writes that Trump “even delivered a speech apologizing to those who were insulted by his comments during the election campaign.” “Americans know how to accept an apology and especially appreciate sincerity,” he says, suggesting that Trump’s comments were just that, not to mention “delicate.” He asks how “the new Trump” will respond to critique by the press, which he blasted on social media for bias just last week. Who will win the battle of honesty, Boaz Bismuth asks, Clinton or Trump? Time will tell, he says.

After Omran Daqneesh’s photo consumed the press worldwide on Friday, Smadar Peri calls it the “picture that you’ll forget tomorrow.” The horror and outrage over the bloodshed in Syria will subside, and “the face of Omran will become, in the best case, a blurred memory.” The Aleppo White Helmet organization that saved him may win the Nobel Peace Prize, she says, but Omran will “join the statistics of a lost generation” who have no homes, no education, broken families and a broken country.

“Yesterday planes dropped cluster bombs on a city neighboring Aleppo. More dead, more injured and hundreds who lost their homes and fled into the street,” Peri says. “The terrible tragedy in Syria, which is no longer a state, won’t end until we get rid of [Syrian President Bashar] Assad.”