How not to put out a fire: 6 things to know for June 14

1. School of hard knocks: A rocket launched from Gaza hit a religious school in the southern town of Sderot, seriously raising the flames on long dormant tensions.

• Most students had already left for the weekend, but a few were still around, and three people were studying just a few meters away from where the rocket struck, Shalom Kahlon, one of the three, tells several media outlets.
• Nobody was injured in the strike, thanks to a combination of the rocket hitting a concrete pillar and not the study hall and the fact that no warhead exploded. The rabbi of the yeshiva tells Channel 12 news that 10 minutes earlier there had been 15 people in the room for evening prayers.
• Pictures of the building show broken windows and a chunk of a concrete wall missing, with debris strewn around.

2. Back to the stone age? The damage may increase quite a bit if politicians get their way, with party leaders competing for most bellicose response.

• National Union leader Bezalel Smotrich is far and away the winner, saying if “forty high-rise buildings were erased in central Gaza – the rocket that was launched this evening and damaged the…yeshiva in Sderot would not have been launched.”
• But even a relative moderate like Blue and White leader Benny Gantz calls for “an attack of unprecedented intensity,” and for taking out Hamas leaders, along with others. Then again, Gantz did once boast about bombing Gaza back to the stone age.
• And Sderot Mayor Alon Davidi repeats his call for a ground offensive. “The situation as it is cannot continue,” he says, according to the Ynet news site. “As I said in the past, only a ground operation will bring peace to our region.”
• For now, though, the army appears to be making do with a series of airstrikes against unspecified “terror infrastructure” around Gaza.

3. Something needs to change, but what? Israel Hayom reports that the army is upping its readiness along the Gaza border for weekly Gaza protests.

• Yedioth Ahronoth notes, though, that Gazan leaders are not giving demonstrators any special instructions in light of the uptick in fighting.
• If this all sounds familiar to you, you are not alone. “For a year and a half we’ve been in a ridiculous, set ritual. They fire incendiary balloons that cause fires, the Israeli army slaps sanctions, they respond with fire and we find ourselves again in a violent round of escalation for 48 hours. Eleven rounds like this thus far have ended with no result… this system isn’t working and we expect a drastic change in our reality,” Eshkol Regional Council head Gadi Yarkoni tells Haaretz.
• Walla’s Amir Buhbut writes that Israel is struggling to find any sort of pressure lever on Hamas that actually works without everything going to hell.
• “It wants to return deterrence, but understands that too painful of a strike could drag the region into dangerous battles in a best case, and in the worst case into a war that nobody wants. Not for terror balloons and not for fires,” he writes.

4. Hormuz whodunit: Fires in the Gulf of Oman, however, may be a different story, with Israel closely watching as pressure rises following an apparent attack on two oil tankers.

• The US is blaming Iran, releasing a video that it says shows Iranian sailors removing a limpet mine on the side of one tanker that did not explode as planned. Iran is denying involvement and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif alleges “sabotage diplomacy,” from his B-team roster of villains.

That the US immediately jumped to make allegations against Iran—w/o a shred of factual or circumstantial evidence—only makes it abundantly clear that the #B_Team is moving to a #PlanB: Sabotage diplomacy—including by @AbeShinzo—and cover up its #EconomicTerrorism against Iran.

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— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) June 14, 2019

• Israel Hayom’s Oded Granot alleges that “all signs point to Iran,” even if Tehran said it helped rescue some of the sailors aboard one of the ships.
• “Just like a pyromaniac who succeeds sometimes takes part in the effort to put out the fire. Iran may not be the only suspect in the twin attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, and the four earlier from last month, but there’s no doubt it’s still the prime suspect.”
• But Haaretz’s Zvi Bar’el writes that it doesn’t make sense for Iran to be behind the attack.
• “The Iranian regime is in the throes of a major diplomatic struggle to persuade Europe and its allies, Russia and China, not to take the path of pulling out of the 2015 nuclear agreement. At the same time, Iran is sure that the United States is only looking for an excuse to attack it. Any violent initiative on Tehran’s part could only make things worse and bring it close to a military conflict, which it must avoid,” he writes.

5. Chernobyl’s Israeli legacy: Nuclear horrors are already all-too real for some Israelis who are still suffering the effects of the Chernobyl disaster.

• A popular HBO show on the Ukrainian nuclear accident has brought new attention to the plight of those called in to help clean up from the nuclear disaster, including some 1,500 people still alive of the 5,000 that immigrated to Israel.
• In ToI, former MK Ksenia Svetlova writes that Israel agreed in 2001 to help those survivors, but the aid never came.
• When the liquidators immigrated to Israel, they asked for the assistance that would enable them to deal with their illnesses and other needs,” she writes. “And indeed in 2001, the late Knesset member Yuri Stern initiated legislation that recognized the liquidators’ work and gave them a unique status. The law specifies their right to public housing, to a one-time grant and to treatment in a special medical facility to be set up for this purpose. Since the passage of the law 18 years ago, however, the state has not implemented it and has not allocated the funding to implement it. In the four years that I served as a Knesset member, I sought answers from the government ministries responsible for this failure.”
• Instead, she writes, she was either ignored, or told that their illnesses did not stem from Chernobyl.
• Speaking to Haaretz, one liquidator named Lev Klotz, says he saved two friends during his mission in the dead zone, but they both died horrible deaths afterwards. “I think that maybe if I hadn’t saved them then, they would have died immediately, without suffering so much,” says Klotz, who later moved to Israel.
• He also alleges (in a Channel 12 interview) that the Soviet authorities had no idea what they were doing. They “had no Plan A and no Plan B… We were learning what to do as we went along.”
• That’s backed up by Kiev native Yelena Artyomenko, who now lives in Haifa and who tells Haaretz that even as the fires were still burning and radiation spreading, health officials assured residents they could still go outside with children.

6. That’s a Rap: Congratulations to the Toronto Raptors, who became the first Canadian team to win an NBA championship, beating the Golden State Warriors in six games.

• They may also become the first championship team to visit Israel (likely after a victory parade around Jurassic Park). JTA points out that team co-owner Larry Tanenbaum told Israeli sports outlet Sport 5 back in April that if the Raptors win it all, he’ll bring them to the Holy Land.
• Sport 5 writes it’s since asked for an update from Tanenbaum’s people, but has yet to receive one.
• Israel has had several brushes with NBA championships in recent years. In 2015, the Warriors beat the Cleveland Cavaliers, which at the time was coached by Israeli David Blatt. The Cavs won the next year, a few months after firing Blatt halfway through the season. In 2018, when the Warriors beat the Cavs (again, uch) they did so just a few weeks after cutting Israeli small forward Omri Casspi. Both Blatt and Casspi still got rings.
• And as a last piece of random trivia for any budding James Holzhauers out there, the Raptors win came just hours after the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team won the Israeli championship for a second year in a row. Another Maccabi Tel Aviv, the soccer one, is owned by Mitch Goldhar, another billionaire from Toronto.