Raoul Wootliff is a former Times of Israel political correspondent and Daily Briefing podcast producer.
The Times of Israel liveblogged Wednesday’s events as they happened.
Police successfully remove the final protesters from the rooftop of one of the nine houses slated to be demolished in the West Bank settlement of Ofra. The move completes the evacuation of the buildings.
Special border police forces were sent in to bring the protesters down after a two-day standoff.
Police said yesterday that they did not intend to forcefully remove the protesters from the rooftops and would instead close off the buildings and wait for them to come down on their own.
The operation to evacuate the nine buildings — eight of them occupied — built on private Palestinian land began yesterday, with police removing right-wing activists and youths from the houses in intermittently violent clashes throughout the day.
Police are requesting the extension of the detention of one protester arrested yesterday during clashes with police as part of the operation to evacuate nine houses in the Ofra West Bank settlement. He will face a ruling on the extension of his detention in the Petah Tikva District Court tomorrow afternoon.
The Honenu legal aid group, which provides defense to right-wing activists, says that at least five people were arrested, four of them for attacking police officers, including three female minors and a 30-year-old resident of Ofra. Another resident of the settlement was arrested for trying to give food to the demonstrators barricaded on the roof using a remote-controlled drone, the group said.
All but one have been released without charges.
At least 11 police officers suffered minor injuries in scuffles with protesters as of Wednesday morning. At least two of the injured officers reported they were bitten by protesters.
French conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon says he will not withdraw from the election despite having received a summons to face preliminary charges in an investigation into an alleged fake jobs scheme.
Fillon tells reporters that his lawyers received the summons today. He denies all allegations and says legal procedure was not properly followed in what he called a political assassination and unprecedented probe during the election campaign for the two-round April-May election.
“I will not withdraw,” he tells reporters at his campaign headquarters. Fillon was once the front-runner for the two-round April-May election but his ratings have slipped because of the investigation. He is seen as a strong challenger to the far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen.
— with AP
Jewish Agency for Israel chairman Natan Sharansky expresses “deep concern” over the recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks and threats in the US.
“If ever there was a line between the anti-Semitism of the far right and the anti-Israelism of the radical left, the demonization of Jews and the demonization of their state, it no longer exists,” Sharansky says in an official statement.
“It is high time that all who hold democratic values dear put their political differences aside and band together to combat these expressions of hatred and violence. I trust that US authorities will act resolutely to find those responsible, bring them to justice, and prevent such incidents from reoccurring,” he adds.
The University of Texas and Austin Police are working to determine whether an incident of vandalism at the campus Hillel was specifically targeting the Jewish community.
The Texas Hillel says that a window of its building was broken on Saturday morning. The vandalism comes amid an uptick across the country in threats on Jewish community buildings.
The office of university president Greg Fenves says in a statement: “The University will assist Austin police as they investigate and determine if this was an act of hate against Jewish students. As the UT community made clear at last week’s town hall, acts of hate — whether posters targeting Muslims and immigrants or a rock thrown at Hillel — have no place here. We will do everything we can to support our students who were affected by this.”
Hillel says in its own statement that it is “working to take specific actions to ensure the safety of the Jewish community on campus,” and said it would provide more details on those actions when they are available.
— JTA
Spanish authorities dispense with language and culture tests for elderly applicants for citizenship under the country’s law of return for Sephardi Jews.
The decision comes after it emerged that it had effectively barred hundreds of elderly Turkish Jews from exercising their right to a Spanish passport, El Pais reported last week.
Spain has naturalized 4,919 applicants for citizenship by Sephardic Jews since the new 2013 citizenship law went into effect last year, according to the daily. However, only 387 applicants were granted citizenship based on the actual law. Others were naturalized by a royal decree and not through the non-discretionary procedure devised for the law.
The tests need to be taken in Spain, a fact which further complicates the ability even of elderly applicants who do speak Spanish and know the country’s culture to actually get tested, according to El Pais.
Karen Gerson Sharon of the Sephardic Center of Istanbul said the dispensation was “very welcome.”
— JTA
Tara Dairy announces that it has mistakenly filled regular milk cartons with chocolate milk.
The snafu affects all one liter cartons of three percent homogenized milk with a use by date of March 24, 2017, the company says in a statement.
Consumers who have purchased the chocolaty blunder are invited to call the customer helpline at 1-800-777-333 in order to switch the bottles for regular milk.
The recently appointed deputy chairman of the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah party says he would accept a one-state solution with total equality, but believes Israel will never accept it.
Mahmoud Al-Aloul, in his first interview since being appointed PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s deputy, tells the pan-Arab daily a-Sharq al-Awsat: “The one state that we’re talking about is historically a democratic state in which everyone lives equally — that is acceptable. However, we know that Israel will not accept it… they cannot agree to it.”
He adds: “They want a purely Jewish state. This is why they have asked us to recognize a Jewish state. We have previously presented a one-state [solution]. There is no problem with this; we accept those terms.”
— Dov Lieber
The deputy chairman of the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah party Mahmoud Al-Aloul says Ramallah is still uncertain about the policies of US President Donald Trump.
“We do communicate with him and his administration. We sent messages to them directly, and through Arab leaders as well… They say they are studying the case. It is still not clear to us what will be the US policy in the coming period,” he tells the pan-Arab daily a-Sharq al-Awsat in his first interview since being appointed.
So far the only known communication between Ramallah and Washington has been through security officials. In February CIA Director Mike Pompeo visited Ramallah and Majid Faraj, head of the PA’s General Intelligence Service, visited Washington.
Aloul, however, denies communication has been only over security. He says there has been “security and political [meetings] as well. And in those that were security,” non-security matters were also discussed.
“A lot of brothers have gone and communicated with key players in [Trump’s] administration,” he says.
— Dov Lieber
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cancels his participation this evening in the annual conference for The Jewish People Policy Institute due to mild illness.
Netanyahu is “feeling a bit under the weather,” a spokesman for the prime minister tells The Times of Israel. He could not confirm whether Netanyahu has seen a doctor.
The Haifa District Court orders an ammonia tank to be emptied by next month, rejecting an appeal by the chemical company that sought to overturn a February court order to empty the storage facility.
In the court’s final decision on the matter, Judge Tamar Sharon Netanel cites the danger the chemical tank situated on the Haifa bay posed to hundreds of thousands of local residents.
“The potential damage that could be caused is unacceptable by any standard,” Netal writes in the court’s final decision on the matter. “This is an issue that threatens the loss of human life, and the health of hundreds of thousands of people.”
The ruling noted the economic interests of Haifa Chemicals’ local facility, but says the potential public health crisis outweighed any financial loss they may incur.
The Haifa Group, a fertilizer producer that operates the tank, was given until April 1 to empty the storage facility. The court also ruled the facility would not be allowed to be used to store ammonia in the future.
One person is injured in a stabbing attack in Hebron, according to Hebrew media reports.
The IDF says it is looking into the reports.
The United States calls on the UN Human Rights Council to drop its “obsession with Israel.”
In a speech before the Geneva-based council, US envoy Erin Barclay says the United States’ commitment to human rights “is stronger than ever.”
“Regrettably, too many of the actions of this council do not support these universal principles. Indeed, they contradict them,” says Barclay, the US deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs.
She cited ongoing abuses in Syria and North Korea, and noted in particular the top UN human rights body’s long-standing focus on Israel.
“The obsession with Israel…is the largest threat to this council’s credibility,” says Barclay, a career diplomat.
“When it comes to human rights no country should be free from scrutiny, but neither should any democratic country be regularly subjected to unfair, unbalanced and unfounded bias,” she adds.
— AP
An Israeli man is lightly wounded in a stabbing attack in Havat Mor near Hebron, according to the Magen David Adom ambulance service.
The victim is 33 years old and suffered stab wounds to his limbs, medical officials say.
The IDF says it is looking into the incident.
The IDF says the stabbing attack near Hebron took place after a terrorist infiltrated the Havat Mor settlement outpost.
After stabbing a man and lightly wounding him, the victim shot the attacker, the army says in a statement.
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The Ministerial Committee for Legislation will vote Sunday on a bill to extend Israeli sovereignty to the Jerusalem-area settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, according to the Walla news site.
The bill is being presented by Likud MK Yoav Kish and Jewish Home MK Bezalel Smotrich.
In January, the cabinet approved a delay in voting on the proposal until after a February meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump.
Three of the four lawyers representing Elor Azaria, the Israeli soldier sentenced to 18 months in prison for shooting dead a wounded Palestinian assailant, announce they will be resigning from the case after it was decided to appeal against his manslaughter conviction and jail term.
Chief defense attorney Yoram Sheftel filed the appeal to the military court earlier today.
In a statement, the resigning lawyers said they believed avenues other than an appeal would be preferable to Azaria.
— with AFP
Keith Ellison sends a letter to US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, urging him to investigate the recent desecration of a Jewish cemetery in the St. Louis area as a hate crime.
Ellison calls on Sessions to designate the attack on the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in University City, Missouri, in which more than 150 headstones were overturned and damaged, as a hate crime.
Less than a week later, about 100 headstones were toppled at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Philadelphia.
https://twitter.com/keithellison/status/836637155166400513/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
“We cannot afford to ignore the series of recent threats against the American-Jewish community,” the lawmaker writes in the letter dated February 27. “Anti-Semitism poses a grave threat to our democracy and every American’s Constitutional right to freely practice their religion.”
“While local law enforcement is working hard to identify the perpetrators, it is evident that a federal Hate Crime investigation is warranted due to the dark history of anti-Semitic attacks of this nature, both here and abroad, and the symbolic message it sends to the Jewish community all over the world,” he writes.
— JTA
Prime Minister Netanyahu meets with India’s national security adviser, Ajit Dova, in preparation for the upcoming visit of the country’s Prime Minister Narenda Modi in July.
Israel’s acting security adviser, Yaakov Nagel, attends the meeting as well in the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu is suffering from a cold and cancelled a speech at the Jewish People Institute later this evening in Jerusalem.
— Raphael Ahren
Taliban suicide attacks that rocked the Afghan capital Kabul Wednesday kill 16 people, Afghanistan’s health ministry spokesman says.
Explosions and gunfire echoed through Kabul after the Taliban assaults on two security compounds, as the insurgents ramp up attacks even before the start of their annual spring offensive.
“Unfortunately, 16 people have been killed in the two attacks in Kabul,” the ministry’s Waheed Majroh says. A further 44 people were also injured in the attacks that struck the Afghan capital around noon on Wednesday, he added.
The carnage underscores rising insecurity from the resurgent Taliban in the war-scarred country.
— AFP
Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit officially notifies the High Court of Justice that he will not represent the state to defend the controversial bill legalizing West Bank settlement outposts.
The bill, which is being petitioned against by several West Bank municipalities, allows Israel to compensate Palestinians whose land has been taken over by settlers, instead of removing the outposts.
In a letter to the court, Mandelblit says that due to “the exceptional circumstances of the case,” he will allow the state to be represented by a private lawyer.
Mandelblit has repeatedly said that he won’t be able to defend the law before the court, warning that it marks the first time Israeli legislation explicitly affirms government support for wildcat settlements, and would openly curtail property rights of Palestinians in the West Bank in a way that contravenes the protections granted to occupied populations under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Breaking the Silence agrees to give the state some of the raw materials it collected for a report it published last year on the 2014 Gaza report, a Petah Tikva District Court announces.
The report included allegations by more than 60 officers and troops of abuse and excessive use of force.
The decision to hand over some of the raw material came in response to a court case brought by the state against the NGO, demanding it release the information. The state attorney’s office says that anonymous witnesses allow potential lies to spread and make it impossible to investigate alleged abuses.
The organization argued that they should be given journalistic privileges to protect their sources as they do “journalistic work.”
Breaking the Silence has now agreed to give information on four specific incidents but will not give any details of the sources.
The IDF denies a claim made by the lawyer representing a soldier convicted of manslaughter that military prosecutors “blackmailed” the other defense attorneys into quitting.
Earlier today, three out of four members of Elor Azaria’s defense team quit after filing an appeal on behalf of the soldier, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison last month for killing a wounded, unarmed Palestinian assailant.
Yoram Sheftel, the only attorney left on the defense team, accused the army of “blackmailing” his colleagues. Their decision to quit was caused by “a meeting they held with the military advocate general on Sunday,” Sheftel said at a press conference.
“They were told… if you file an appeal, then the military prosecutor will file an appeal,” he said.
The implication is that the prosecution would argue in their appeal that the 18-month sentence for Azaria’s manslaughter conviction is insufficient and demand a harsher punishment. During sentencing, the chief prosecutor Lt. Col. Nadav Weissman demanded a three- to five-year prison term.
“This borders, in a sense… on blackmail,” Sheftel said.
In a statement, the army says it “rejects to the end” Sheftel’s claim, but did not dismiss the possibility of military prosecutors filing an appeal. “The military advocate general will continue to work substantively. The decisions whether or not to file an appeal has yet to be made, but will be in the coming days,” the army says.
— Judah Ari Gross
Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders is returning to the campaign trail, days after cancelling events ahead of the country’s March 15 election amid security concerns.
In a press release Wednesday, Wilders says voters want to meet him and he wants to meet them.
Security risks, he said “will be reduced to the minimum. I’m looking forward to it.”
Last Thursday, Wilders suspended open campaigning in the wake of alleged leaking of sensitive information by a security official who is part of the team giving him round-the-clock protection.
Wilders, whose party is slipping in polls but remains on track to make big gains, says he will hand out flyers in three Dutch cities before the election, take part in debates and give interviews in Dutch media among other events.
— AP
The oldest fossils ever found are “direct evidence” of life on Earth 3.8 to 4.3 billion years ago, researchers report in the journal Nature.
Even at the lower end of the spectrum, “the microfossils we discovered are about 300 million years older” than any runners-up, says Dominic Papineau, a professor at University College London who made the discovery.
The fact that life kick-started not long after Earth formed suggests it could also emerge on watery worlds outside our Solar System at comparable stages of formation, the scientists say. Earth and Mars had liquid water on their surfaces at the same time, notes lead author Matthew Dodd, a graduate student at the London Centre for Nanotechnology. “We could expect to find evidence for past life on Mars four billion years ago,” he says.
The tiny fossils — half the width of a human hair and up to half-a-millimetre in length — found in rock formations in Quebec, Canada, take the form of blood-red tubes and filaments formed by ocean-dwelling bacteria that fed on iron. Locked inside white, flower-like quartz structures known to harbour fossils, they were found along what were once warm-water vents on the ocean floor, most often in deep waters.
— AFP
Russian warplanes bombed US-backed fighters in several small villages in northern Syria after they mistakenly thought Islamic State forces were in the area, a top US general says.
Army Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend says Russian and Syrian regime aircraft attacked the villages to the southeast of Al-Bab in Aleppo province on Tuesday, resulting in an unspecified number of casualties.
The Russians apparently had observed IS fighters moving out of the area and so wrongly assumed that incoming forces were jihadists.
“We had some Russian aircraft and regime aircraft bomb some villages that I believe they thought were held by ISIS, yet … actually on the ground were some of our Syrian Arab Coalition forces,” Townsend tells reporters in a video call from Baghdad.
— AFP
Cabinet ministers will vote Sunday on accepting the recommendation of the Anti-Drug Authority to decriminalize marijuana, according to Justice minister Ayelet Shaked.
Writing on Twitter, Shaked says “decriminalization is an important change that will stop thousands of normal people from being considered criminals.”
The proposal, which will dramatically change the way the Israeli penal code treats private and recreational use of the drug, is being put forward by Shaked and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan.
Under the proposal, home use and possession of marijuana will carry no punishment but those caught smoking in public could be subject to a series of punitive measures. First-time offenders would be charged a NIS 1,000 ($265) fine but would not have a criminal case filed them. That sum would be doubled on the second offense.
Those caught for a third time could still escape prosecution on condition they accept a number of possible measures, including loss of their gun or driving license and participation in a rehabilitation program. Only those caught smoking in public on a fourth occasion would be subject to automatic indictment.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanks US President Donald Trump for condemning a rise anti-Semitic attacks across the US.
In the opening to his first joint address to Congress on Tuesday, Trump described the recurrent bomb threats to Jewish institutions and desecration of Jewish cemeteries as a reminder “of our nation’s path toward civil rights and the work that remains.”
In a pre-recorded message to the Jewish People Policy Institute’s annual conference, Netanyahu says he appreciates what Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have done so far to help combat anti-Semitism and hopes other world leaders will do the same.
Close to a hundred Jewish institutions have been targeted with bomb threats since the beginning of the year.
In the last week, hundreds of Jewish tombstones in Pennsylvania and Missouri have been vandalized and numerous Jewish institutions have received bomb threats, including 29 on Monday alone — the fifth wave of such scares since January.
A UN panel says the evacuation of eastern Aleppo, after months of siege and aerial bombing by Russian and Syrian forces, was one of many war crimes committed by those fighting for control of Syria’s once largest city.
The findings come amid open-ended peace talks mediated by a UN envoy, and could bolster opposition demands for a political transition in which Syrian President Bashar Assad would cede power — something the government has adamantly rejected.
The Commission of Inquiry on Syria unveiled a report looking at violations by all parties in last year’s battle for Aleppo, including the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, and the use of chemical agents and cluster munitions.
The panel singled out a “particularly egregious attack” in which Syrian warplanes targeted a humanitarian aid convoy.
“The scale of what happened in Aleppo is unprecedented in the Syrian conflict,” says the commission’s chairman, Paulo Pinheiro.
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