Tamar Pileggi is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
The Times of Israel liveblogged Monday’s events as they unfolded.
Qatar hands its official response to a list of demands by Saudi Arabia and its allies to the emir of Kuwait, a Gulf official tells AFP.
The response is delivered by Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani who made a short visit to Kuwait, which is acting as a mediator to resolve the diplomatic rift, says the Gulf official, requesting anonymity.
— AFP
Police say they have uncovered a huge cache of stolen weapons, including M16 rifles, and arrested six men.
The suspects are accused of breaking into a weapons arsenal on an IDF base in southern Israel on May 26 and stealing 33 M16s. Eleven of the rifles were recovered, along with three other weapons. Cops also found various illegal drugs including ecstasy.
Police also confiscated NIS 1 million ($285,000) in cash and four vehicles allegedly used in the incident, valued at NIS 400,000 ($115,000).
Police are requesting the court to extend the remand of the six men, who were arrested as part of a crackdown on illegal weapons.
French energy giant Total is set to defy US pressure by signing a multi-billion-dollar gas deal with Iran, the first by a European firm in more than a decade.
Total is to invest an initial $1 billion (880 million euros) in the South Pars offshore gas field as part of a consortium with Chinese and Iranian firms.
It is by far the biggest vote of confidence in the Islamic republic since sanctions were lifted under a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Total’s CEO Patrick Pouyanne and Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namadar Zanganeh are set to sign the 20-year deal, which will eventually see the consortium pour $4.8 billion into the project.
— AFP
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hails Israel’s strong democracy and its close ties to the US, amid a spat with US Jewry over his government’s recent moves on the Western Wall and conversion.
At the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu extends Fourth of July greetings, saying Israel was also “celebrating the festive day of the strongest democracy in the world, our greatest friend – the United States.” He adds that Israel’s “alliance with it is strengthening.”
Netanyahu also says many European leaders who he spoke to during during his weekend trip to Germany for the funeral of late chancellor Helmut Kohl expressed a “very warm and friendly” attitude toward Israel.
German police say they believe that 18 people died in a Bavarian bus accident after the bus rammed into a truck and burst into flames.
Bavarian police say 30 others were injured, some seriously, and were brought to hospitals for treatment. The others, they said in a statement Monday, “are believed to have died on the burning bus.”
The bus carrying 46 passengers and two drivers rammed into the trailer in a traffic jam on the motorway A9 close to the Bavarian town of Stammbach.
Police spokeswoman Irene Brandenstein says the bus was carrying a German senior citizens’ tour group.
— Agencies
The Nazareth District Court convicts 22-year-old Yinon Reuveni for the 2015 arson attack by a group of Jewish extremists that heavily damaged a church in northern Israel where Christians believe Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
During the sentencing hearing, Judge George Azulay acquits 21-year-old Yehuda Asraf, who was accused of assisting Reuveni in setting the church building fire.
Two rooms of the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes in Tabgha on the Sea of Galilee were vandalized and badly damaged in the fire two years ago.
The complex reopened to pilgrims in February this year following eight months of renovation work at a cost of around one million dollars, of which the State of Israel contributed almost $400,000.
Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman says it’s business as usual in Israel’s Golan Heights, despite the recent spate of spillover fire from the Syrian civil war.
At the weekly Yisrael Beytenu faction meeting, Liberman says he toured the Israel-Syrian border this morning, and reports that farmers are still plowing their fields, tourists are braving the heatwave and “the citizens are continuing in their routines, in peace and security.”
He adds Israel is “not looking for excuses” to get involved in the conflict across the border, and said “we will be very, very angry if they disturb this peace and security.”
— Alexander Fulbright
A top Syrian official says the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons refused to visit key sites linked to a nerve gas attack, casting doubt on the international monitor’s credibility.
Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad dismissed an OPCW report released last week confirming the use of sarin gas on the opposition-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in April. He says the inspectors refused government invitations to visit the site of the attack or the military airport allegedly linked to it.
The report, which relied on samples taken to Turkey, did not say who was responsible for the attack.
Western nations blamed the attack on government forces, and US President Donald Trump ordered a missile attack on a Syrian air base. Syria insists it has never used chemical weapons.
— AP
A day before the Labor primaries, fringe candidate Dina Dayan is pulling out of the race and will support Isaac Herzog in the leadership bid, according to Hebrew media reports.
Dayan, an ultra-Orthodox woman from southern Israel who has cast herself as a protest vote, was formerly an activist who supported Herzog, reports political blogger Tal Schneider.
Herzog is set to give a press conference at 4:30 p.m.
The number of candidates in tomorrow’s race is now down to seven, after former general Amiram Levin withdrew his candidacy last week and announced he would back former minister Avi Gabbay.
— Marissa Newman
Egyptian security forces arrested the daughter and son-in-law of the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, who is in exile in Qatar.
A statement from the prosecutor says Youssef al-Qaradawi’s daughter Ola and her husband, Hossam Khalaf, were arrested in a Mediterranean coastal resort on Sunday over allegations of membership in a terrorist organization. On Monday, they were ordered detained for 15 days pending investigation.
Egypt branded the Brotherhood a terrorist organization after the 2013 ouster of President Mohammed Morsi, a member of the group. Thousands of Brotherhood members have been killed and arrested since in a sweeping crackdown.
Al-Qaradawi was sentenced to death in absentia. He is on a sanctions list by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — four Arab nations involved in a dispute with Qatar.
— AP
US President Donald Trump tweets that “interesting things are happening” on Middle East peace, following a phone call he held with the king of Saudi Arabia.
“Spoke yesterday with the King of Saudi Arabia about peace in the Middle-East. Interesting things are happening!” the president says in the post.
Spoke yesterday with the King of Saudi Arabia about peace in the Middle-East. Interesting things are happening!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2017
It wasn’t clear whether Trump was referring to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Saudi Arabia’s ongoing feud with its Gulf neighbor Qatar or speaking generally about the conflict-plagued region.
As Israel swelters in the grips of a sizzling heatwave, the country breaks its electricity use record for 2017.
According to figures announced by the Israel Electric Corporation, Israelis consumed 12,438 megawatts of power at 3 p.m. running air conditioners full-blast during the hottest part of the day.
Temperatures in Jerusalem reached 37º degrees Celcius (98.6º Fahrenheit), while the Dead Sea area reached a high of 43º degrees Celcius (110º Fahrenheit).
Shas leader Aryeh Deri attacks US Reform leader Rabbi Rick Jacobs and Israeli Reform leader Gilad Kariv, suggesting the latter seeks to convert illegal immigrants en masse to Judaism, thus granting them Israeli citizenship.
At the start of the weekly faction meeting, Deri says Kariv had political aspirations to join the Zionist Union, citing his involvement in an NGO that helps African aslyum-seekers.
He says his conversion bill — since shelved for six months — that would end recognition of private conversions was an effort to stem the tide of illegal immigration to Israel.
“If I recognize every private Orthodox or Reform conversion, there will be no end,” he says, linking it to the African “infiltrator problem.”
“Within a year or two, they will all convert [if private conversions are accepted],” he says. “Is that the path we want to go down?”
Saying he was preserving the Jewish character of the state, Deri also says Jacobs is accepting of intermarriage.
“I leave it to your imagination what will happen here in a year or two if the keys to the Law of Return… are in these people’s hands,” he says of Jacobs and Kariv.
The interior minister says he will withdraw the conversion bill if pluralistic NGOs pull their court petitions on conversions.
Deri slams the “incitement campaign” against the ultra-Orthodox as a result of the conversion bill and for pushing the government to freeze the plan to build a mixed-gender plaza at the Western Wall.
“There is an incitement campaign of lies against the ultra-Orthodox that is being led by interested parties who want to break up the coalition,” says Deri. In comments directed at his coalition partner Avigdor Liberman, he says there is “misinformation” about the ultra-Orthodox and denies they are trying to turn Israel into a halachic [Jewish legal] state.
“We don’t want to change anything,” he says.
— Marissa Newman
King Salman of Saudi Arabia cancels attendance at this week’s G20 summit in Hamburg, the German government says, as Riyadh is engaged in a diplomatic standoff with Qatar.
“The government has received official notification that King Salman will not travel to the G20 summit,” a spokesman tells AFP.
The 81-year-old monarch will send Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan in his place, the German news agency DPA says separately.
The monarch was to have joined the meeting of major industrialized and emerging economies on Friday and Saturday.
— AFP
A group of UN envoys visit on the City of David Archaeological site in Jerusalem, in an effort to promote a greater international understanding of the historical Jewish ties to Israel’s capital city.
The delegation of ambassadors from Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia are guided on a tour of the site by Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon.
“To defeat the lies spread about our capital city at the UN, nothing is more important than for my fellow ambassadors to learn the truth about Jerusalem and see the beauty of this city first-hand,” Danon says of the visit in a statement.
The UN’s cultural body has come under fire by Israel when its executive board earlier this year ratified a contentious resolution denying any legal or historical Israeli links to Jerusalem and calling Israel an “occupying power” in its capital.
French President Emmanuel Macron says he will “this autumn” lift a state of emergency in effect since the jihadist attacks in Paris in November 2015 that killed 130 people.
“I will re-establish the freedoms of the French people by lifting the state of emergency this autumn, because these freedoms are the precondition of the existence of a strong democracy,” Macron says in an address to both houses of parliament.
— AFP
A compromise deal proposed by a former Supreme Court judge tasked with mediating the ongoing crisis between doctors and management at Hadassah’s pediatric cancer ward is rejected by Health Minister Yaakםv Litzman.
According to Channel 2, Litzman rejected the deal because it included moving some of the children to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital for treatment, which would necessitate opening a new pediatric cancer department there, a plan which he opposes.
The issue will go to the High Court of Justice at 11:30 a.m. tomorrow if the sides are unable to reach an agreement.
US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman earlier today met with the leader of the left-wing American Jewish group J Street, the organization he once referred to as being “worse than kapos.”
Following the closed door meeting between Friedman and J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami, the group released a statement emphasizing the importance of maintaining “an open line of communication” with people of “different political backgrounds.”
“We value Ambassador Friedman’s willingness to meet with Congressmen as part of the pro-Israel lobby J Street. We believe it is vital to keep an open line of communication between Jewish American and Israeli leaders with different political backgrounds,” media outlets quoted J Street as saying. “Its significance is that it symbolizes the will and desire to maintain a dialogue among the pro-Israel community, even with those that do not agree with J Street.”
The group also said it stressed to the US ambassador “the urgent need to advance the two-state solution.”
In a 2015 op-ed for the right-wing Israel National News website, Friedman called J Street supporters “smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas — it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.”
“They are far worse than kapos – Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps,” he added.
— Alexander Fulbright
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara visit the USS George H.W. Bush that is currently docked outside Israel’s Haifa port.
“This great aircraft carrier is a floating island of America. It’s a symbol to the world of freedom and victory,” he says in an English speech aboard the world’s largest warship.
“The war against ISIS should be seen for what it is: a clash between good and evil. And every sailor on this ship should be immensely proud that you are serving good,” Netanyahu says.
“Israel too is a symbol to the world of freedom, victory, and it too helps secure the world against terror. It too is on the front line of the battle between civilization and darkness,” Netanyahu adds.“I thank you, the people of Israel thank you, and the free world thanks you.”
The Netanyahus are joined on their tour of the aircraft carrier by US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.
Thousands of Israelis arriving home this afternoon are being greeted by excessively long lines at Ben Gurion airport.
The lines for Israeli passport holders are stretching past the inspection hall up towards the arrival gates.
The backlog was caused by Israelis who are traveling without the biometric passport.
נתב"ג: פקקי ענק אתמול בתור הכניסה לארץ בביקורת הדרכונים @NoganNir pic.twitter.com/kmVvFEcQ5y
— חדשות 10 (@news10) July 3, 2017
The Magen David Adom emergency rescue service says it has treated some 367 people in the last 2 days weather-related conditions as temperatures have soared throughout the country.
MDA says most of the cases were people who felt weak or fainted from the sweltering temperatures. Some 28 people were treated for dehydration, the MDA says, including a 17-year-old girl who was hospitalized yesterday to Tel Hashomer Hospital in moderate condition.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection opens a criminal investigation into Rotem Chemicals, the fertilizer company whose Negev facility poured tens of thousands of tons of acid waste through a nature reserve on Friday.
The investigation will also extend to Rotem’s parent company, Israel Chemicals.
Yesterday, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority said Nahal Ashalim will be closed to visitors for a year, and warned the cleanup and rehabilitation of the wadi would take years and cost tens of millions of shekels.
Firefighters are working to put out a fire raging in an industrial zone near the the West Bank settlement of Matityahu.
In a statement, police say the fire has burned four factories, 12 cars, and lightly injured one person.
According to police, 12 firetrucks are at the scene working to put out the fire.
The Palestinian terrorist believed by Israeli intelligence officials to have planned the kidnap and murder of three Jewish teens in the West Bank in the summer of 2014 is reportedly living in Lebanon, after being expelled from Qatar.
Saleh al-Arouri is believed to be the group’s military commander in the West Bank and the founder of the West Bank branch of Hamas’s military wing.
Palestinian sources confirmed earlier this month that Qatar — now embroiled in a boycott by Saudi Arabia and four other Arab states — asked several top Hamas officials to leave for Lebanon, Turkey and Malaysia.
An unspecified “security operation” is causing delays at Ben Gurion airport, reports in Hebrew-language media say.
The Defense Ministry and the air force order the airspace around Ben Gurion partially closed for the next three hours.
An ultra-Orthodox man who works to promote the enlistment of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews into the military receives a package with a fake bomb at his Beit Shemesh home.
Received by his wife, the envelope with the word “revenge” written on it and had wires sticking out of it.
Police sappers called to the scene determined it was not an explosive device.
An investigation into the incident is opened.
Saudi Arabia is hoping for a “positive” response from Qatar to demands that it end support for “terrorism” and its associations with Iran.
Riyadh and its allies on June 5 severed diplomatic and transport ties with their gas-rich Gulf neighbor Qatar, in the worst diplomatic crisis to hit the region in decades.
They issued a list of 13 demands, but announced earlier today a 48-hour extension to the deadline which had been due to expire last night.
— AFP
Police spokeswoman Luba Samri says the fire broke out in the central West Bank settlement of Matityahu.
In an earlier statement, Samri said the blaze at the settlement’s industrial zone burned four factories, 12 cars, and lightly injured one person.
Some 12 firetrucks worked to put out the fire.
The Israel Airport Authority denies reports the airspace over Ben Gurion airport is closed over an unspecified “security operation.”
“The skies have not been closed,” the Authority says in a statement.
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