Adiv Sterman is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
The Times of Israel liveblogged Thursday’s developments as they unfolded.
The bodies of 12 terrorists killed in attacks against Israeli civilians and security forces will be handed over at 4 p.m. to the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian media reports.
According to the reports, the exchange which comes without any preconditions on part of the Israeli government, will take place at the Ofer checkpoint near the Palestinian West Bank city of Ramallah.
Two Arab Israeli citizens from Jerusalem planned to plant explosives at the Rio Hotel in Eilat several weeks ago, it is cleared for publication.
The hotel staff noticed the two acting suspiciously and reported them to the management and security personnel, who arrested the would-be attackers and uncovered their plot.
The Southern District Prosecution filed with the District Court in Beersheva indictments against the two over charges of forming a conspiracy and aiding an enemy in wartime.
The Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office says a 10th suspect is arrested in the Paris attacks probe.
The office adds that numerous cellphones are seized as part of the investigation as well.
Belgians officials also say six more people have been brought in for questioning and seven searches carried out in connection with a suspected plot to stage extremist attacks over the holidays.
The Federal Prosecutor’s Office says the police searches were executed in the morning in various Brussels-area locations. It says a magistrate will decide whether arrest warrants should be issued against six people brought in for questioning.
Two men have already been arrested in connection with the suspected plot, both members of a motorcycle club. A judge ordered them held for another month.
— AP
Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulates Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the New Year.
The Kremlin website publishes a message in which Putin notes with satisfaction that Russian-Israeli relations are positive.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right) and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Jerusalem on June 25, 2012 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/Pool/Flash90)
Putin expresses his determination to make every effort in the new year to improve bilateral relations for the benefit of citizens of Russia and Israel, and to ensure stability and security in the Middle East, according to the statement.
Khalil Nimri and Ashraf Slaimeh are named as the two Arab Israeli residents of Jerusalem who are suspected of planning to carry out a terrorist attack at a hotel in the southern city of Eilat.
According to an indictment filed with the Southern District Court against Slaimeh and Nimri, the two met while working together in a different Eilat hotel.
Nimri, according to the indictment, said he “wanted to avenge the death of his childhood friend killed in October [while carrying out a] stabbing attack in Jerusalem.”
The indictment also indicates that Nimri first offered to carry out a stabbing attack and murder a religious Jew, but Slaimeh convinced him that they would likely get caught. Slaimeh suggested instead that the two plant a bomb in a hotel in Eilat.
On November 30, Slaimeh came to the hotel to collect information. He introduced himself as a customer wishing to rent a hotel room for an extended period of time and asked to see different rooms at the hotel.
The staff at the hotel became suspicious of Slaimeh and alerted authorities, who arrested him. Nimri was arrested as part of the investigation as well.
Hackers bring down the BBC’s websites for several hours in a large-scale cyber-attack, the British public broadcaster reports.
“Sources within the BBC said the sites were offline thanks to what is known as a ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDOS) attack,” the BBC reports.
Users trying to access BBC.com and related websites could only see an error message saying: “The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy.”
The BBC press office blames the problem on a “technical issue.”
Illustrative: a computer (Pexels)
“We’re aware of a technical issue affecting the BBC website and are working to fix this now,” it says in a statement.
The BBC website is now back up and operating normally.
The BBC’s international website BBC.com and its news app reached a readership of more than 101 million unique browsers a month earlier this year.
DDOS attacks are used to slow down or disable a network by flooding it with communication requests.
— AFP
New Zealand, the first nation with a sizable population to celebrate the New Year, counts down the seconds to midnight with a giant digital clock on Auckland’s landmark Sky Tower. Horns blare and crowds cheer as the tower was lit up with fireworks, with colors shifting from green to red to white.
In Australia, simultaneous fireworks displays erupt along Sydney’s famed harbor, where people crowd onto balconies, into waterside parks and onto boats as they search for the best view, clinking glasses and whooping with joy as the first pyrotechnics explode.
More than 1 million people are expected to watch the glittery display, featuring a multicolored firework “waterfall” cascading off the Harbour Bridge and effects in the shapes of butterflies, octopuses and flowers.
Woman celebrate the coming of a new year as they wait for the annual New Years Eve fireworks display in Sydney, Australia, Thursday, December 31, 2015. (AP/Rob Griffith)
Australian officials, struggling to contain the threat from home-grown extremists, encourage revelers to enjoy the evening and assure them that thousands of extra police are patrolling major cities.
“Don’t change your way of life,” Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle urges residents of his city. “Don’t let events from around the world challenge the way that we live.”
— AP
Four Arab Israelis from Jaljulya were arrested last month for allegedly engaging in illegal weapons trafficking and involvement in riots in October 2015, it is cleared for publication.
The four were nabbed in a joint Shin Bet security service and Israel Police operation.
Judges at the Petah Tikva Magistrate’s Court release to a 10-day house arrest a detainee suspected of taking part in the murder of three members of the Palestinian Dawabsha family in the firebombing of their home in the West Bank village of Duma.
Earlier this week, a teen released after being detained for a month as a suspect in the fatal Duma terror attack claimed in a Channel 2 interview that Shin Bet interrogators tortured him while he was in custody.
The minor, identified only by the Hebrew initial “Ayin,” reiterated charges made by the lawyers of the suspects in the July 31 murders that the internal security agency used severe interrogation techniques against the detainees. State prosecutors on Monday submitted a statement of intent to indict Ayin for an attack on an Arab youth two years ago, but not in the Duma case.
Ukrainian police arrests an ultra-Orthodox couple from Israel at a Kiev airport after finding more than two pounds of marijuana in their luggage.
The website of Ukraine’s border police does not identify the Israelis arrested at Boryspil Airport on Sunday but says they were apprehended in a combined operation by the country’s security service, police and customs.
The news site www.ch10.co.il, which specializes in news from the Haredi world, suggests the couple may have been framed in connection with the woman’s legal battle for custody over her nine children from her ex-husband. The article does not name the individuals involved, citing privacy considerations.
According to the article, the couple and the ex-husband are members of a “prominent Hasidic group based in central Israel.” It was identified as the Bnei Brak-based Ger Hasidic dynasty, one of Israel’s largest, by Israel Greenhouse, a lecturer on the Haredi world and former member of that community.
— JTA
Iraqi troops are removing bombs and debris from the city center of Ramadi days after driving out Islamic State fighters, as rainy weather slows further combat operations.
Anbar Provincial Council head Sabah Karhout tells The Associated Press that sporadic clashes and airstrikes are taking place in areas that are still under IS control. He says a major offensive to clear the remainder of the provincial capital is on hold due to the bad weather.
He says families are still trapped in the IS-held areas of the city, where they are being used as human shields.
On Monday, Iraqi forces backed by US-led airstrikes drove IS out of the city center. IS captured Ramadi in May despite months of US-led airstrikes, dealing a major blow to Iraqi forces.
— AP
The prime minister’s wife, Sara Netanyahu, arrives at police’s Lahav 433 anti-corruption unit to be questioned under caution over suspected spending irregularities at the Prime Minister’s Residence, despite a request by the family’s lawyer to close the investigation.
Police are set to question Sara Netanyahu as part of an ongoing investigation into the cash management at the official and private residences of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Hebrew media reports.
Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, arrives to testify at the trial of former employee Guy Eliyahu in the Jerusalem Regional Labor Court, October 29, 2015. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Last week Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein rejected an urgent request by Sara Netanyahu’s attorney for a meeting ahead of his decision on whether to order an investigation into her conduct.
The Jerusalem District Attorney’s Office files with the District Court for youth in the city an indictment against a 15-year-old Arab Israeli girl over two counts of attempted murder and two counts of possession of a knife. According to the indictment attributed, the teenager attempted to carry out a stabbing attack and murder Jews in Jerusalem.
According to the indictment, the girl bought a set of five knives in East Jerusalem.
A tourist became suspicious of the teenager and alerted security forces, who arrested the girl and took her in for questioning.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets former Yesha Council Chairman Danny Dayan, in light of the delay of the latter’s appointment as Israel’s Ambassador to Brazil.
Dayan says after the meeting that he and Netanyahu “see eye to eye” regarding the crisis and possible ways to solve it, the Walla news site reports.
Dani Dayan, former head of the Yesha Council, on December 14, 2014 (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Earlier this week, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff told Israel that she is unhappy with the appointment of former settler leader Dayan.
Rousseff said she was worried that accepting Dayan as ambassador would be understood as support of Israeli settlements, the report said.
In light of the storm raging in north Israel and the snow that is expected to begin falling later tonight, the Safed Municipality announces that tomorrow there will be no school in all educational institutions in the city.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls on world leaders to step up attacks against the Islamic State.
Netanyahu says that “the threat to our civilization from Islam has two branches, the Shiite-led Iran and the Sunni-led Islamic State.”
He says the only way to thwart Islamic extremism is to “forcefully strike” radical elements.
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon says Israel has the power to attack any target it wishes, no matter how far or how guarded.
“The capability of our aircraft to reach any place, at any time and strike those who wish us ill, who relentlessly try to disrupt the lives of Israeli citizens — through terror attacks or the smuggling of advanced weaponry — is a capability with enormous value to our national security,” Ya’alon says.
“Even now our enemies know that if they even try to harm us, we will hit back with force, and we will do it by any means that we find appropriate — from the air, the sea and the land.”
“We have no intention to compromise on the security of the citizens of Israel, and the terror organizations on the other side of our border, any border, should not test us.”
“We will act with great determination, but also with wisdom and responsibility.”
Turkish security forces killed 3,100 Kurdish militants in 2015, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says, vowing no let-up in a relentless offensive to oust rebels from towns and mountains in the southeast.
His remarks, which were part of a televised New Year’s address, come as alarm grows over the humanitarian impact of curfews in the southeast to back up the latest military campaign against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that began earlier this month.
“In 2015, 3,100 terrorists were neutralized in operations at home and abroad,” he says referring to the military operations on PKK strongholds in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan looks on at the US Chief of Missions Residence during a bilateral meeting December 1, 2015. (Photo by AFP Photo/Jim Watson)
“Our security forces are flushing out the terrorists from every inch of the mountains and the towns and will continue to do so,” he says.
“Our fight.. will continue until the very end,” adds Erdogan.
It was not possible to independently verify the toll.
— AFP
An online petition calls on Whole Foods to cut financial and institutional ties with Marc Gafni, a former Orthodox rabbi and spiritual teacher who has been dogged by accusations of sexual misconduct.
Nearly 900 people sign the petition as of Thursday morning on the Change.org website. Launched Tuesday, the petition urges signers to “Stop Marc Gafni from Abusing Again.”
The petition says it aims to “prevent future harm to those who may be exposed to him, and as a protest against any individuals, organizations, or institutions that support or endorse him as a teacher or leader.”
“Complicity in giving Gafni a platform is a violation of our tradition’s highest ethical and moral standards: ‘Justice, Justice shall you pursue’ and ‘Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor,’” it says.
Polyamorous spiritualist Marc Gafni. (Photo by GafniMarc/Flikr CC BY-SA 2.0)
The New York Times published a feature article on Gafni on December 25 under the headline “A Spiritual Leader Gains Stature, Trailed by a Troubled Past.”
The petition singles out Whole Foods, whose co-founder, John Mackey, is chairman of the executive board of Gafni’s Center for Integral Wisdom, a New Age think tank.
Gafni, who has ordination from the Orthodox and Renewal movements, long has been trailed by accusations, and he has acknowledged some inappropriate behavior, including sexual impropriety.
For a time seen as a charismatic Orthodox teacher of Torah in Jerusalem, Gafni eventually stopped identifying as Orthodox. The Renewal movement disowned Gafni after a public airing of his sexual and ethical breaches.
Several years after leaving Israel and dropping off the Jewish map, Gafni reemerged in Utah as a practitioner of a Kabbalah-inspired philosophy called evolutionary spirituality. More recently, Gafni, who has authored several books on spiritualism, moved to California and founded the Center for Integral Wisdom.
— JTA
Egypt’s recently elected parliament will convene on January 10, more than three years after the last such assembly was dissolved by a court order, the state-run news agency says.
The MENA report comes weeks after elections were held amid low turnout, despite government efforts to boost participation. The chamber is widely expected to serve as a rubber stamp for President Sissi, who as military chief led the overthrow of Islamist president Morsi in 2013.
Pro-government candidates won all 60 seats designated for lists, and the rest of the 596 seats went to independent candidates, most of whom support Sissi, as well as presidential appointees.
Voting was repeatedly delayed by debates over the election law, and the assembly was initially supposed to convene in December.
— AP
Israel Police decides to release from detention the groom whose wedding was featured in a video clip showing dozens of far-right guests celebrating the Duma firebombing attack that killed three members of a Palestinian family in July.
Yakir Ashbel was taken in for questioning over his participation in the event, in which wedding-goers danced with guns, knives and a mock Molotov cocktail. Ashbel was brought Wednesday before a court, which decided to release him to house arrest.
Three other suspects held in connection to the wedding will be released in the coming hours as well.
The Islamic State group claims the bombing of two restaurants in a predominantly Kurdish city in northeastern Syria the previous night, an attack that killed at least 16 people and wounded more than 30.
Syria’s state news agency SANA says the “terrorist explosions” hit a Christian neighborhood in the city of Qamishli. A poster hung up at a local church says 13 of the victims were Christians, and that their funerals would take place later Thursday.
The bombs went off in the city center, near a security point run by government troops, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of activists and other sources inside Syria.
The extremists have suffered some of their worst setbacks in battles with Kurdish fighters in Syria, and have carried out dozens of suicide attacks against the Kurds, including several in Qamishli.
— AP
US Department of Justice says authorities thwarted an attempted terrorist attack in Rochester, New York.
The attack was to be carried out on New Years Eve by a 25-year-old man suspected of being affiliated with the Islamic State.
The man was arrested.
The Red Crescent says it received 7 bodies of Palestinians killed while carrying out terrorist attacks against Israelis.
The bodies were handed over by Israeli authorities at the Ofer checkpoint near the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Iranian President Hassan Rohani announces that he ordered the country’s Defense Department to expand its ballistic missile program, after the Obama administration said it is preparing new sanctions against companies and individuals for Iran’s ballistic missile program.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the US Treasury Department was preparing sanctions against several individuals and companies in Iran, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates related to Iran’s ballistic missile program. The Treasury and the White House declined to comment on the Journal report, which was attributed to anonymous US officials.
Sidney Mintz, a renowned American scholar credited with creating the field of “food anthropology,” died this week at the age of 93, US media reports.
Mintz, who died after sustaining serious injuries in a fall, achieved fame after the publication in 1985 of his book, “Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.”
The New York Review of Books heaped praise on the groundbreaking work, saying it “shows how the intelligent analysis of the history of a single commodity can be used to pry open the history of an entire world of social relationships and human behavior.”
Mintz’s research laid bare the the connection between European imperialism, modern slave labor, and what he called “proletarian drug foods,” such as sugar, coffee and rum.
Mintz said in an interview that an earlier seminal study, “Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History,” explored the plight of agricultural workers, “nearly all of them people of color, working at ghastly jobs producing basic commodities — mostly for consumers in the West.”
Born in 1922 in Dover, New Jersey to Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, Mintz received a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University in New York.
The New York Times wrote that he played a key role in creating a black studies curriculum at Yale University in the early 1970s, before joining Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, where he helped found its anthropology department in 1975. He was named professor emeritus at Hopkins in 1997.
At its heart, his research “aimed at understanding how world food habits are changing, how the causes of such change work… and what the future may hold for the food systems of human beings everywhere,” he wrote on his website.
In addition to his wife, the former Jacqueline Wei, news reports said Mintz is survived by two children, Eric Mintz and Elizabeth Nickens, and two grandchildren.
— AFP
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says the Israeli government is deceiving the public.
“Your government is deceiving you, he says, according to the Ynet news site. “It does not want peace – not for you, not for us. The Israeli government wants the land and peace for itself alone.”
He adds that “tanks and planes will not bring you peace.”
Fire breaks out in a residential building near Dubai’s massive New Year’s Eve fireworks display.
It is not immediately clear what caused the fire, which runs up at least 20 stories of the building near the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper.
Burning debris rains down from the building as firetrucks race to the scene. It is not immediately clear if anyone was wounded in the blaze.
— AP
The Central District Prosecutor’s Office files an indictment with the Ramle Magistrate’s Court against a platoon commander and a soldier in the Armored Corps for the alleged 2013 shooting to death of 16-year-old Palestinian Samir Awad in Ramallah.
According to the indictment, the two men shot Awad eight times while the Palestinian was fleeing an army force after he was spotted attempting to cross a security barrier illegally.
The two are accused of committing the attack in violation of the IDF’s rules of engagement.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett says that while he was not involved in the decision to disqualify from high school curricula a book that depicts a love story between an Israeli and a Palestinian, he wholeheartedly backs the rejection.
The Education Ministry announced Wednesday that Israeli author Dorit Rabinyan’s “Gader Haya” (translated as “Borderlife” in English) had been rejected for inclusion.
“I read parts of the book,” Bennett says in an interview with Channel 2. “It presents IDF soldiers as sadistic war criminals, comparing them to the fighters of Hamas, and there’s a [romantic] affair between an Israeli and a former [Palestinian] security prisoner.”
Teachers had requested the book’s inclusion in the ministry’s reading list but its content was deemed unfit for high school students.
“Do we want to push that IDF soldiers are sadists?” Bennett adds. “Is this what 18-year-olds ahead of army service should learn?”
A ministry spokeswoman was quoted by the Haaretz daily Wednesday as saying the book was rejected because it could undermine the “separate identities” of Jews and Arabs.
Bennett did not comment on the spokeswoman’s specific rationalization for the book’s rejection.
An official in Dubai says there are no casualties in the fire that occurred at a Dubai hotel during New Year celebrations.
The official also says authorities were able to control the spread of the flames.
