Northern frights

An evil wind blew from the north on Tuesday, and Wednesday’s papers focus both on rising tensions with Syria, and the death of a soldier while clearing landmines in the Golan.

Yedioth Ahronoth is the only paper to lead off with the mine disaster, reporting that the soldier was felled by an anti-tank device several times stronger than a regular mine, and the army had trouble identifying and collecting the soldier’s body because of the size of the blast.

The paper also includes a sidebar about the NGO started by a young Daniel Yuval, who had his leg blown off by a mine in 2010, which calls for all the mines in the Golan to be cleared out. “The time has come to do something massive and quickly so disasters like those won’t happen anymore,” his mother is quoted as saying, which is a somewhat strange reaction considering the soldier was killed attempting to do just that.

Maariv and Israel Hayom both lead with Syrian tensions, reporting on the threats issued by IDF chief Benny Gantz after an Israeli jeep was fired on by Syria on Tuesday. Israel Hayom notes that, despite the big words by Gantz (and the minister of defense, who said largely the same thing), the rest of Jerusalem seems to be keeping quiet on the matter. Not so for Hamas, though, the paper reports, noting senior Hamas official Musa Abu Marzouk told Egyptian television that not only was it time for Assad to go, but Hezbollah should also check itself before it wrecks itself.

But Hezbollah takes orders from no man, unless that man is in Tehran and has a big beard, writes Maariv’s Asaf Gabor: “Sources in Iran note that Tehran sees Israel as the key to keeping Assad in power. According to those sources, Iran instructed Hezbollah and Palestinian elements backing Assad to heat up the frontier near Israel for two reasons: One is to defeat the rebels. The second, which is part of the psychological war on the Syrian populace and the Arab world, is to boost Assad’s standing as the Syrian president not afraid to stand up to the big Israeli enemy.”

Haaretz, meanwhile, leads off with the lightning-fast gun control rules passed following Monday’s bank shooting in Beersheba. Among the reforms, the paper says, are that school guards will have to leave their guns at work and gun owners will have to get new permits every year and prove a need for their gun. There are currently some 160,000 private firearms held legally in the country, and another 13,000 guns whose permits have not been renewed, the paper reports. The reforms are meant to cut back on the number of guns held in the country and to close loopholes that let some keep their guns even if they don’t need them, like if somebody moves from a “dangerous area” to Tel Aviv.

“If they don’t report it, we don’t know, and we know some of them don’t report it,” Public Security Ministry gun control czar Yaakov Amit told the paper. “We want the information to come from whoever holds it, not from the person, but from [an official] source.”

Yedioth quotes the mother of the killer, Itamar Alon, from a Channel 2 interview, running the headline “My pain is over the families, not for my son.” However in the interview, she also lashes out at the media for sullying her good son’s name.

“We know our son very well, and they just want to run it through the dirt… In this country, that’s what they know, to sully only the good people, the decent, the upright… He was respectable in the army, with the ranks, with everything, a wonder. I’m proud of him.”

Underneath a photo spread of the massive wedding of Belz hassidim in Jerusalem Tuesday night, Maariv reports that the army is walking back its figures for how many Haredim it hopes to draft to fewer people than were at the wedding. The paper says the new draft for ultra-Orthodox induction rules call for 2,300 new uniforms in 2014 instead of 2,500 and a similar drop in the next two years as well.

In Israel Hayom and Haaretz, writers try to turn the tables on the popular sentiments running for or against politicians.

Israel Hayom’s Dror Eidar mounts a rare defense of Benjamin Netanyahu, which will hopefully allow him to sleep easy on his bed made of poor people’s crushed dreams. “Even if Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu sweep their own home, fly in a Piper and eat tuna sandwiches, they won’t let them rest. The way they are treated borders on pathological. Not a political disagreement, not ideological, not even revulsion. It’s hate.”

Meanwhile, Haaretz Arabist Zvi Bar’el says the country’s infatuation with Yair Lapid is wearing thin, especially since the centrist is refusing to take left-wing positions.

“The illusion we had about him until recently was built on sparse information and fed by his initial mystery. But the pre-election spell has popped like a bubble. Lapid’s splendor is already behind him. He reached his peak, befittingly, on pronouncing his political doctrine in The New York Times. It’s pointless even criticizing his words, since they don’t really outline a theory, ideology or policy, but a collection of musings appropriate for all occasions. All the same, he will quickly deny even these, in Hebrew of course. This is because Lapid isn’t an ideologue. He isn’t on the political right or left or in the center or on the margins. If political engineering were a profession, Lapid could teach it.”