Elie Leshem is deputy editor of The Times of Israel.
The Times of Israel liveblogged Monday’s developments as they unfolded.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his entourage land in Uganda, where he is slated to meet with leaders and mark the 40th anniversary of Operation Entebbe, in which his brother Yoni was killed, with a special ceremony.
Netanyahu descends from the plane and is greeted by diginitaries and a military honor guard.
A military band plays Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” followed by the Ugandan national anthem.
A Ugandan honor guard greets Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s entourage upon landing in Entebbe on Monday, July 4, 2016 (screen capture: YouTube)
The two Palestinian terrorists who carried out the lethal Sarona Market shooting were “inspired” by the Islamic State, but were not formally affiliated with the organization, according to an indictment filed against the pair.
On June 8, cousins Muhammad and Khalid Muhamra opened fire in a restaurant in the heart of Tel Aviv, killing Ido Ben Ari, Ilana Naveh, Michael Feige and Mila Mishayev, and wounding over a dozen. They fled the scene but were captured by private security guards and police a short time later.
The two, along with a third man, Younis Ayash Musa Zayn, who had assisted and planned to join them, are charged with murder in a Tel Aviv District Court.
Khalid Muhamra (left) and Muhammad Muhamra (right) were identified as the two Palestinian cousins from the West Bank village of Yatta who carried out the terror attack at the Sarona Market in central Tel Aviv in which four Israelis were killed. (Courtesy)
Zayn did not take part in the attack for “technical reasons,” the Shin Bet security service says, but had been involved in its conception and had purchased the guns used from a local manufacturer.
During their interrogations, the trio told investigators they had been planning the terror attack for approximately six months, the Shin Bet says. Allegedly, they originally intended to carry out the shooting on a passenger train, but later changed their minds because of the difficulty in sneaking guns past security at the stations.
The decision to attack the Max Brenner restaurant in Sarona was “random and decided on the day of the attack,” the Shin Bet says in a statement.
The three young men, all in their early 20s, are residents of the Palestinian village of Yatta, outside of Hebron.
— Judah Ari Gross
The Sarona attack was carried out with improvised Carl Gustav-style submachine guns, known as Carlos, which have been used in a number of attacks during the ongoing terror wave. The simple, homemade submachine guns lack accuracy and range, but are well-suited for mayhem as they are generally fully automatic.
According to the Shin Bet, they were purchased from a gun manufacturer in Yatta, who has been arrested along with nine other local residents believed to have been involved in the attack in some way, the Shin Bet says.
The IDF has released video of their arrest:
— Judah Ari Gross
Akiva Laxer, one of the Entebbe hostages, utters a blessing of thanks for surviving the ordeal.
“On behalf of my three children,” he says, “I bless You, Lord, our God, Who has performed a miracle for me in this place.”
Entebbe hostage Akiva Laxer utters a blessing of thanks at a 40th anniversary commemoration on Monday, July 4, 2016 (screen capture: YouTube)
ENTEBBE — Under a huge white tent sit several hundreds of guests, including several dozen Israeli soldiers, Ugandan officials and members of the local Jewish community.
The speeches are being delivered at a control tower of the Old Entebbe Airport, where the hostage drama unfolded 40 years ago to the day.
The ceremony starts with a song sung in Hebrew by an IDF officer.
The song, “Eretz Tzvi,” is “most associated with the Operation Entebbe,” the emcee says.
Also present are the president of Uganda and his wife, who is the minister of education and sport. Her Israeli counterpart, Miri Regev, is also here.
Also present are MK Omer Bar-Lev, IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan, IDF Military Intel chief Herzi Halevi and MFA director-general Dore Gold. Former defense minister Shaul Mofaz, Giora Eiland, and others who participated in the raid are on hand.
Also here are representatives of the victims and active duty soldiers from the units that took part in the operation.
— Raphael Ahren
The emcee, reading from a paper notebook, says that the rescuing of hostages is an important religious commandment in Judaism.
She reads out the names of the three victims who were killed at the airport, and Dora Bloch, the 72-year-old British-Israeli who was later killed in a Ugandan hospital.
— Raphael Ahren
As the music plays, a memorial flame is lit by an Israeli soldier, a son of hostages, one of whom was killed.
— Raphael Ahren
Addressing the crowd, Netanyahu says he is “moved” to stand on the ground where IDF soldiers freed the hostages thousands of kilometers from Israeli soil.
“I am moved to stand here on the place where IDF troops rescued hostages here in the heart of Africa, so far from home,” he says.
He mentions his brother Yoni, who he says charged at the head of the force that landed in the airport and attacked the terrorists.
“Entebbe is always with me, in my thoughts, my consciousness and deep in my heart,” he says.
“Every one of you,” Netanyahu continues, “the soldiers and pilots, whether here or not — you didn’t know whether you would come home.
“You came to rescue, but you knew that if something went wrong there was no certainty that someone would come to rescue you.”
— Raphael Ahren
Netanyahu turns to the families of the hostages, “whose loved ones were killed in or after the operation,” and says that just as they experienced “terrible pain,” so did he upon learning that his brother had been killed.
He says that despite the terrible price, the operation was a success and boosted Israel’s reputation.
He says it offers a lesson for the present day, when the world is still challenged by terrorism.
Switching to English, Netanyahu says Africa is a “continent on the rise.”
To applause, he says the Jewish state seeks “to upgrade ties with all Africa states.”
He says he’s “proud” to be the first Israeli prime minister in decades to visit Africa.
“Israel is coming back to Africa, and Africa is coming back to Israel,” he says, repeating verbatim a slogan he coined when he announced this trip several months ago.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is an extremely moving day for me,” he says, returning to the subject of the Entebbe raid. “Terrorism suffered a stinging defeat.”
That operation, Netanyahu thunders, was proof that “good can triumph over evil.”
The raid on Entebbe, Netanyahu continues, “was a watershed moment for my people.”
During the Holocaust, he says, “we were murdered by the millions, stateless. The State of Israel has changed that.
“It was perhaps in Entebbe where this transformation was seen by the world. We were powerless no more.”
He says that in order to defeat terrorism, the world needs two things: “Clarity to distinguish good from evil, and courage to fight back against terrorism. We must condemn all acts of terrorism, regardless of where they are committed.”
— Raphael Ahren
Addressing the ceremony, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni says that the Entebbe raid was “another bond” linking “Palestine to Africa.”
He invokes the biblical story of Joseph, which “was also a sad story but also created a bond, just like this one here.”
He also says “baby Jesus” was hidden in Egypt, apparently implying that he was “another bond between Africa and Palestine, both born out of sad circumstances.”
He says that “even… the Muslim religion” bonded with Africa when the Prophet Muhammad was forced to flee to the continent.
Museveni goes on to link other historical and mythical events that connect the Middle East to Africa.
He turns to Netanyahu. “Your brother Jonathan, some Israeli hostages, and some Ugandan soldiers were killed here, on that night, fourth of July 1976,” he says. “Fortunately, the rescue mission succeeded and the innocent civilians were rescued.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni addresses a ceremony marking 40 years since the Entebbe raid (screen capture: YouTube)
Museveni says terrorists must be distinguished from freedom fighters.
“Our movement is a liberation movement,” he says. “Never use terrorist methods.
“When it comes to which war to fight it is both about the cause and the method. We must fight for a just cause, but also use civilized methods in fighting.”
He adds that “indiscriminate use of violence in forbidden. Even soldiers when they are not armed should not be attacked — that’s our doctrine. We’re a liberation movement, we use violence for the cause of Africa but it’s disciplined and purposeful violence. Not indiscriminate violence.”
The Ugandan leader relates a story about a meeting he once had with the Iranian president at the time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“When I went to Iran, and there was the man who was president at the time, the one before the current one – Ahmadinejad – I told him about this biblical story,” he says, meaning the stories linking Jews to the Holy Land. “He was telling me the Jews are not from the Middle East, but from Europe. I said no, I have my Bible, I had my Bible with me, I showed it to him.”
Museveni relates that Ahmadinejad “didn’t know at all.
Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in July 2013 (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)
“In the Bible it talks about the Persians and Midianites. I said where are the Midianites? I know you are the Persians. But where are Midianites? He didn’t know.”
The point is, he says, “There is a lot of ignorance. Sure, I don’t want to tell my Arab friends and our Iranians friends that you are all mentioned in the Bible.”
He also notes, as an aside, that “Ugandans believe you are Christian… they don’t know that you are the grandchildren of Abraham.”
— Raphael Ahren
Netanyahu lays a wreath at a monument commemorating the raid on the airport.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lays a wreath commemorating the victims of the Entebbe raid on Sunday, July 4, 2016 (Raphael Ahren/Times of Israel)
An Israeli court convicts one of the country’s most prominent businessmen of securities fraud.
The Tel Aviv District Court finds former IDB Holding Corp. controlling shareholder Nochi Dankner guilty of carrying out millions of dollars’ worth of fraudulent transactions in an attempt to influence the share price of the troubled company.
IDB, whose holdings include a major mobile phone carrier and a leading supermarket chain, took on millions of dollars in debts following a series of bad business deals. The courts wrestled control of IDB away from Dankner as a result.
Dankner, a favorite of Israel’s business community, was often credited with helping rescue Israel’s economy at the height of a Palestinian uprising. Under his leadership IDB became Israel’s largest holding company and Dankner became a celebrity.
Israeli businessman Nochi Dankner at the Tel Aviv District Court on July 4, 2016 (Flash90)
— AP
The first truck hauling humanitarian aid from Turkey to the Gaza Strip since the signing of a reconciliation agreement between Jerusalem and Ankara arrives at the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Israel, according to the Defense Ministry.
The first shipment includes teddy bears and diapers for children in Gaza. It will be followed by trucks bearing thousands of kilograms of food and other necessities to the Strip.
The shipment arrived yesterday at the Ashdod Port and will enter the coastal enclave shortly, the ministry says.
— Judah Ari Gross
The Maariv daily runs a bogus quote attributed to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, apparently after mistaking a satirical Facebook post for news.
The satirical post, published Sunday by Raz Tsipris, quoted Zuckerberg as supposedly responding to Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, who had accused Facebook’s founder a day earlier of partial responsibility for the deaths of Israelis in terror attacks.
“I heard the words of MK Gilan Erdan and it saddens me that he chose to go to the counties of shaming,” the post read.
It was a deliberately badly translated reference to former Knesset member Yinon Magal’s initial response earlier this year to sexual harassment accusations leveled at him — in a Facebook post — by a former employee. A more accurate translation would have said, “It saddens me that he chose to resort to shaming.”
The episode involving Magal and the former employee, journalist Racheli Rottner, triggered a national debate about the legitimacy of “shaming” on Facebook.
Tsipris’s post Sunday garnered almost 700 likes and was shared multiple times. Apparently, it was also seen by someone in Maariv’s newsroom.
“Yesterday,” the report in the paper says, “Mark Zuckerberg, one of the owners of the social network Facebook, responded to the statement by Minister Gilad Erdan, who accused him of failing to prevent incitement… ‘It saddens me that Minister Erdan chose to resort to shaming,’ Zuckerberg wrote in a post.”
A report in the Maariv daily on Monday, July 4, 2016. The underline quotes Mark Zuckerberg as saying, ‘It saddens me that the minister resorted to shaming.’
Tsipris seems pleased to have been the source of the error in Maariv. In a subsequent post, he writes, “OK, wow. Wow, wow, wow, Maariv, wow. Yesterday I fabricated a post by Mark Zuckerberg on my own Facebook page. Today Maariv ran an item about it. I’ve never been so proud of myself and so ashamed of print media.”
Finance Ministry Moshe Kahlon, leader of the coalition Kulanu party, says he pressured Prime Minister Netanyahu to resume construction of apartments for Jews in East Jerusalem.
“We have no choice now but to build a lot,” Kahlon, speaking at a Kulanu faction meeting, says he told Netanyahu over the weekend.
The government approved new construction in several settlements in response to terror attacks last week that killed two Israelis in the West Bank — a man and a teenage girl. Jerusalem, however, did not receive new construction permits.
“There is a single goal to murdering a girl in her sleep and to firing on passing vehicles — sowing terror and fear and causing people to leave their homes,” says Kahlon, who is considered a relative moderate when it comes to the Palestinians. “It is important that we make it clear to the murderers that the future of the settlements in Judea and Samaria will be determined through negotiations.”
His statement was also apparently a reference to a decision to construct 600 apartments in the Arab neighborhood of Beit Safafa, which has garnered criticism from multiple ministers in the cabinet.
The family of Miki Mark, who was killed in a shooting attack in the West Bank on Friday, breaks the news of his death to his widow, according to Ynet.
Chava Mark, who had been in a medically induced coma for two days after the attack, was awakened yesterday in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital, but was not immediately informed of her husband’s death.
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s president strongly condemns all forms of racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism as he leads commemorations marking the 70th anniversary of a massacre of Jews after World War II.
Duda speaks in Kielce, where communist police and a mob killed dozens of people on July 4, 1946. Coming a year after the end of World War II, the killings sent waves of fear through Poland’s Jewish community and sparked a wave of Jewish emigration from Poland.
“In a free, sovereign and independent Poland there is no room for any form of prejudice, for racism, for xenophobia, for anti-Semitism,” Duda says in a speech in Kielce, according to remarks carried by the Polish news agency PAP.
The massacre in Kielce occurred when townspeople and communist-era police attacked the Jews of Kielce with guns and clubs. The mob killed 42 people, mostly Jews, while about 30 more were killed in a violent frenzy that spread across the area. The massacre was a huge blow to the estimated 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors — those left from a prewar Jewish population of nearly 3.5 million — leading many to feel unsafe in their homeland.
— AP
Presidential candidate Donald Trump hits back at the media for stories saying that a recent tweet of his was anti-Semitic.
He says the tweet, a picture of an attack ad against his opponent Hilary Clinton that included an image of a six-pointed star, was not invoking a Star of David, as critics claimed, but rather a sheriff’s badge.
“Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff’s Star, or plain star!,” he tweets.
Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff's Star, or plain star!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 4, 2016
A report Sunday traced the image in his original tweet to a white supremacist message board.
An image tweeted, and then deleted, by Donald Trump on July 2, 2016 that uses a Star of David to call Hillary Clinton ‘the most corrupt candidate ever!’ (screen capture:YouTube)
Britain’s immigration minister says he can’t guarantee that European Union citizens who live in the UK will be able to stay after the country leaves the bloc.
James Brokenshire tells the House of Commons that “EU nationals continue to be welcome here” and “their right to enter, work, study and live in the UK remains unchanged” since the vote last week to leave the bloc.
But he says a guarantee that they would be allowed to remain after Britain negotiates its EU exit “would be unwise without a parallel assurance” from other EU countries that British citizens can continue to live there.
A final split from the EU is likely several years away. Opposition politicians are demanding the government ease the uncertainty of some 3 million EU citizens by guaranteeing they can stay.
Labour legislator Gisela Stuart says that it was wrong to make them “bargaining chips” in negotiations.
— AP
Prime Minister Netanyahu participates in a multilateral meeting in Entebbe with the presidents of Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan and Zambia; plus the prime minister of Ethiopia, Hailemariam Desalegn; and the foreign minister of Tanzania, Augustine Mahiga.
Then he holds an extended meeting with the Ugandan president.
Later there will be dinner and joint statements before his entourage flies on to Nairobi.
— Raphael Ahren
Israel will allow Turkey to transfer money to a list of pre-approved banks in the Gaza Strip, a Hebrew-language copy of the rapprochement deal between the two countries shows.
The document, published by the Walla news site, confirms that the Israeli government will transfer $20 million to Turkey “in order to compensate the families bereaved during the (Mavi Marmara) flotilla incident.”
It is signed by Foreign Ministry Director Dore Gold and a Turkish undersecretary of state.
הנוסח העברי להסכם עם טורקיה pic.twitter.com/4PvnPCqHC1
— אמוץ שפירא (@amotzsh) July 4, 2016
Tanzania says it will open an embassy in Israel.
The country’s foreign minister informs Netanyahu of his country’s intention to do so during a summit in Uganda.
— Raphael Ahren
Israeli police are investigating Prime Minister Netanyahu over money he may have received from businesspeople abroad, Channel 2 reports.
The report, which is short on detail, says that the probe has been extended to other countries, although no suspects have been questioned yet.
According to suspicions, Netanyahu made use of the money donated by bussinesspeople during his current term in office, the report says.
There has been no comment from Netanyahu and his representatives, or the police, over the investigation.
A resident in the largely Shiite eastern Saudi Arabian region of Qatif says a suicide bomber and a car bomb have struck a neighborhood there, but that no injuries were immediately reported.
Mohammed al-Nimr tells The Associated Press the bomber detonated his suicide vest Monday evening when most residents of the neighborhood were at home breaking the Ramadan fast.
Qatif is heavily populated by Shiites, who are a minority in the Sunni-ruled kingdom. Al-Nimr says that near the body of a suicide bomber was a car bomb that also went off around the same time.
The attacks struck next to a Shiite mosque. The Islamic State group has in the past attacked Shiite places of worship in Qatif.
— AP
A blast occurs in Saudi Arabia outside one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, according to a Saudi-owned television channel.
Al-Arabiya news channel shows images of fire raging in a parking lot with at least one body nearby.
— AFP
Sarah Bard, Clinton’s director of Jewish outreach, says that “Trump’s use of a blatantly anti-Semitic image from racist websites to promote his campaign” is part of a pattern.
“Now, not only won’t he apologize for it, he’s peddling lies and blaming others,” she adds in a statement. “Trump should be condemning hate, not offering more campaign behavior and rhetoric that engages extremists.”
— AP
Early reports say two soldiers or security guards were killed in the suicide attack in Medina.
Video footage from the scene shows a large fire, apparently in a parking lot, and a crowd assembling around it.
Four people are dead and one is wounded after the attack in Medina, CNN reports.
The report, which cites a local official, does not provide details of the casualties’ identities.
Official: Suicide bombing kills 4 in Medina, Saudi Arabia; Country's 3rd attack in 24 hours. https://t.co/iY8R3Zxg9E pic.twitter.com/ArB1KogQZd
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) July 4, 2016
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