The Times of Israel liveblogged Thursday’s events as they unfolded.
A House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 storming of the US capitol has found gaps in White House call logs from that day, and believes calls then-US president Donald Trump is known to have made are missing, The New York Times reports.
The report says there is currently no evidence that logs were destroyed.
The committee is also checking whether Trump violated the Presidential Records Act, after boxes of presidential records were discovered at his Florida estate and a news report surfaced of him destroying documents while in office.
Oversight committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney says that she is “deeply concerned that these records were not provided to the National Archives and Records Administration promptly at the end of the Trump administration and they appear to have been removed from the White House.”
The Presidential Records Act mandates that records made by a sitting president and his staff are preserved in the archives, and an outgoing leader is responsible for turning over documents to the National Archives at the end of the term.
The Washington Post reported recently that Trump “tore up” data that was both “sensitive and mundane” and that the National Archives have referred the matter to the Justice Department to investigate whether Trump violated the Records Act.
Channel 13 reports that for the first time in Israel’s history, a senior IDF official will be posted in an Arab country — Bahrain.
The naval officer will travel to the Gulf country in the coming weeks, the network says, and will serve as a liaison for the United States Fifth Fleet, based in the kingdom.
Channel 13 says the move was agreed upon during Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s visit last week.
Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton is promoting a plan to start teaching English as early as preschool, Channel 13 reports.
Currently, English studies begin in third grade. The network notes that in Europe children often get their first exposure to English during preschool.
The new plan would see children spend 15-30 minutes a day on activities tied to English studies.
The Hula Lake Natural Reserve and Bird Park reopened today after being shuttered in December due to a serious bird flu outbreak.
“The park opened after all necessary preparations were made according to the guidelines of the Ministries of Agriculture and Health,” the Jewish National Fund, which runs the park, says.
“Starting today the general public will be able to enjoy again the variety of activities the park has to offer and its thousands of birds.”
Former attorney general Avichai Mandelblit blocked police requests to tap into the phones of former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son and wife, Ynet reports.
An unnamed former senior police investigator tells the website that as part of the criminal investigations into Netanyahu, cops asked to wiretap Yair and Sara Netanyahu.
“We had zero access to electronic media, at the office and at home. Mandelblit didn’t authorize it,” the unnamed ex-cop says. “We asked to listen in — the attorney general blocked it.”
“We kept saying that Sara is clobbering us in the questioning, and we can’t even check her phone, to see if she said what she claims, or wrote what she claims, in areas tied to the probe,” the official says. “We did not get permission to request court orders to wiretap them, and we kept complaining that we were being handicapped and our hands were being tied.”
Prince Charles, the eldest son and heir to Queen Elizabeth II, is isolating after testing positive for coronavirus for the second time, his office says.
“The Prince of Wales has tested positive for COVID-19 and is now self-isolating,” says a message on the prince’s official Twitter page.
Charles had been due to unveil a statue in Winchester, southern England, but his attendance was canceled at the last minute, leaving him “deeply disappointed,” Clarence House says.
The prince met recently with the Queen, but the 95-year-old monarch is not currently displaying any symptoms, an unnamed royal source tells the domestic Press Association news agency.
The coalition’s Meretz party is criticizing the government’s economic plan, announced yesterday, to help alleviate living costs for Israelis, in particular working families.
The party says the plan is insufficient, and “actually leaves out the weakest groups in society.”
Meretz suggests raising the minimum wage, boosting benefits for workers, subsidizing daycares for young children, lowering the VAT, and more.
Lebanon’s government approves the state budget for the current year, with a 17% deficit, the prime minister says. He describes the development as a first step in reforms desperately needed in the crisis-hit country.
The budget will now be sent to parliament for discussion and once lawmakers approve, it will go into effect. A two-day parliament session on the budget has been scheduled for February 21.
For more than two years, Lebanon has been undergoing its worst economic crisis and the newly appointed government has done little to stem the meltdown. Talks with the International Monetary Fund have failed to make progress amid deep disagreements between the government, the central bank and the banking sector.
The government has been meeting almost daily since late January to discuss the budget.
Critics say that the government deficit will be covered by printing money. That would lead the Lebanese pound, which has lost more than 90% of its value over the past two years, to lose even more value in the coming months.
A Sudanese man who likely crossed the Lebanese border into Israeli territory near the town of Shtula is detained by troops, the Israel Defense Forces says.
The man, apparently a work migrant, is being questioned by soldiers and security officials at the scene.
There are frequent attempts by migrants to illegally cross into Israel to find work due to the deteriorating economic conditions in Lebanon and other regional countries.
A new study by health provider Maccabi shows Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccines are very safe for pregnant women’s fetuses.
The study published today in JAMA Pediatrics, a peer-reviewed American medical journal, examined 17,000 pregnant women who were vaccinated, as well as 7,000 who were not, between March and October of 2021.
The research looked at preterm births, hospitalizations, birth defects and infant mortality, and found no discernible difference between the groups in any area.
Infant mortality stood at 0.1% in both groups; preterm births was at 4.2% for babies whose mothers were vaccinated and 4.8% for those whose mothers were not; defects stood at 1.5% for those exposed to the vaccine and 2.1% for those not; and hospitalizations in newborns were at 5.1% for vaccinated mothers and 5.3% for unvaccinated.
The study shows the findings were also true in 2,000 newborns whose mothers were specifically vaccinated in the first trimester — seen as the most sensitive period for fetuses.
Some 200 Jordanians, including officials at the Royal Hashemite Court, had their phones hacked allegedly by Israeli spyware companies, Ammon News, an Amman-based news site, reports.
Several Jordanians tell the news site that their iPhones were accessed, saying they were notified of the hack, though not by who.
“Informed” American sources tell Ammon News that of some 8,000 phones around the world hacked by Israeli companies, 200 were Jordanian.
Officials at the Royal Hashemite Court, the Olympic committee, as well as a senator, an activist, and the wife of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi were targeted, the report says. (Khashoggi was allegedly targeted by NSO Groups’s Pegasus software in the lead up to his murder in 2018.)
There is no outside confirmation of the report.
Latvia’s parliament passes a Holocaust restitution bill that includes compensation for lost Jewish property and funding to revitalize the Baltic nation’s Jewish community, which was almost completely wiped out during World War II.
Following years of wrangling over the issue, lawmakers in the 100-seat Saeima vote 64-21 to approve the Law on the Compensation of Goodwill to the Latvian Jewish Community on the bill’s final reading.
Lengthy negotiations involving the World Jewish Restitution Organization, or WJRO, Latvian Jewish representatives and government authorities started in 2005. The United States and Israel also were involved in the talks.
The bill authorizes spending 40 million euros ($45 million) over 10 years to revitalize Latvia’s 9,500-strong Jewish community, provide social and material assistance to Holocaust survivors, and to fund Jewish schools, building restoration and cultural projects.
Latvia was occupied in June 1940 by the Soviet Red Army, which was pushed away a year later by Nazi Germany’s advancing troops. Moscow retook Latvia in late 1944, and the country remained part of the Soviet Union until it gained independence in 1991.
Some 95,000 Jewish people lived in Latvia before World War II. The thriving prewar community suffered enormous losses during the Nazi occupation. By the time the Red Army reoccupied Latvia, an estimated 90% of the country’s Jews had perished.
The opposition’s entire right-wing bloc of parties has announced a boycott of Army Radio following the removal of pundit Jacob Bardugo’s daily evening show.
They also call for the closure of the radio station.
Russia rolls its tanks across Belarus for live-fire drills that draws an ominous warning from NATO and adds urgency to Western efforts to avert a feared invasion of Ukraine.
NATO says Russia’s deployment of missiles, heavy armor and machine-gun-toting soldiers marks a “dangerous moment” for Europe some three decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The war games — set to run until February 20 — follow a gradual Russian military buildup around Ukraine that some US estimates say has reached 130,000 soldiers grouped in dozens of combat brigades.
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has waded into a swirling controversy over Nazism unleashed by a popular podcast in Brazil, saying it should be repudiated along with every other totalitarian ideology, including Communism.
The far-right leader’s comments come after star talk show host Bruno “Monark” Aiub said Monday during his YouTube podcast that Brazil “should have a Nazi party recognized by law.”
Aiub’s remarks led prosecutors to open a hate speech investigation against him, and ignited a firestorm in Brazil, which is deeply divided heading into elections in October in which Bolsonaro is expected to face leftist ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
With his hardline base facing scrutiny, Bolsonaro — himself no stranger to criticism for his past statements on Nazism — takes to Twitter to stake out his stance, without directly mentioning Aiub or his remarks.
“Nazi ideology should be unconditionally and permanently repudiated, without exception, like EVERY totalitarian ideology that places fundamental freedoms such as the rights to life and liberty at risk,” the president writes.
Prosecutors notify four settler youths, who were involved in a car chase more than a year ago that led to the death of a fifth teen, that they are to be indicted for hurling stones at Palestinians, subject to a hearing.
The indictment would charge the four suspects with a racially motivated “terror act” of hurling throwing stones at Palestinian vehicles, and driving without a license, the prosecution letter reads.
Ahuvia Sandak, 16, was killed in a crash while fleeing from police in December 2020, shortly after the alleged attack on Palestinian drivers.
The letter says the suspects, including Sandak, took stones “about the size of a fist” and hurled them a Palestinian vehicle traveling some 90 kilometers (56 miles) per hour near the settlement of Kohav HaShahar. One stone shattered the windshield, and another caused damage to the car’s body, prosecutors charge.
Some Muslim groups in Indonesia are demanding the closure of the country’s first permanent Holocaust exhibition, charging that it is part of an effort to normalize Indonesia’s relations with Israel.
The exhibit launched timed to International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 and is located at Indonesia’s only synagogue, Shaar HaShamayim, located in Indonesia’s North Sulawesi province. “Shoah: How is it Humanly Possible?” was created by the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center, which is based in Israel.
Yaakov Baruch, Shaar HaShamayim’s rabbi, says his motivation to open the exhibition was personal.
“When I had this idea to build a Holocaust museum, the reason was to remember my family who died in the Holocaust on my grandmother’s side,” Baruch says. “And I also want to educate Indonesians on the danger of antisemitism, especially the danger of hate crimes.”
Earlier today, Army Radio announced that right-wing commentator Jacob Bardugo, a fervent supporter of former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would stop hosting the daily 5 p.m. news show.
According to acting station head Galit Eltstein, this is in order to clearly separate news from opinion at the station.
Bardugo will continue to host a Friday morning program.
This has led to outrage in Netanyahu’s support circle, and now at least five Likud MKs say they will boycott the station and refuse to be interviewed there: Amir Ohana, Galit Distel-Atbaryan, Yoav Kisch, Keti Shitrit and Ofir Katz.
Netanyahu said Bardugo’s removal from the daily show is “an outrage and further testimony to democracy and freedom of speech being trampled upon by the left. They’re trying to shut up the last right-winger at Army Radio.”
Meeting German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett says Israel believes a return to the 2015 nuclear deal would be “a mistake that would endanger the entire region.”
Bennett also tells Baerbock he believes a deadline must be set for the Vienna talks with Tehran, as negotiations dragging on while Iran continues to enrish uranium only serves the Islamic Republic’s interests.
The two also discuss other regional matters and medical cooperation on COVID-19.
Military prosecutors file indictments against three Palestinian men accused of carrying out a deadly shooting attack in December in which an Israeli man, Yehuda Dimentman, was killed outside the illegal Homesh outpost in the northern West Bank, the Israel Defense Forces says.
The three men — Muhammad Youssef Jaradat, Mahmoud Ghaleb Jaradat, and Ghaith Ahmed Yassin Jaradat — are each charged with “intentionally causing death,” the equivalent of murder in the military legal system, though only two of them were suspected of carrying out the deadly shooting itself. Their indictments come a week after a Palestinian teenager was charged with driving the getaway car that was used in the attack.
The mother of the minor and one of the adult suspects are also due to be charged with failing to prevent the attack and with assisting them afterward, as her teenage son had told her about the plans in advance and she helped hide the weapons that they used after the attack, the military says. A number of other Palestinians are also being charged for failing to prevent the attack and for their involvement in selling the guns used in the attack.
According to the indictment, the three men who carried out the attack planned the shooting in advance, picking the targets (Israeli settlers) and the location (Homesh) and planning their escape route. They also planned to steal the body of one of their victims, the IDF says.
On December 16, the three suspects arrived at the road outside of the Homesh outpost, where settlers illegally operate a yeshiva, or religious school, and waited several hours for a car to leave the area. When one finally did, two of them took positions alongside the road armed with guns, while the third ran back to the escape car. As the car carrying Dimentman and two other students at the illegal yeshiva passed by, they started shooting, each of them firing 20 bullets before a jam made their guns stop working, and they then fled the scene in the escape car. Dimentman sustained fatal wounds and the two other passengers were lightly wounded.
The three suspects, along with the minor who acted as a driver, were arrested a few days later and have been in military custody since.
In a letter to the prime minister, foreign minister and transportation minister, the heads of Israeli airlines El Al, Arkia and Israir warn they face major disruptions to their routes to Dubai amid ongoing unresolved security issues.
Disagreements between the Shin Bet and authorities in the United Arab Emirates over security arrangements in the central Gulf city’s airport are threatening flights there.
Israeli airlines say that due to the disagreements, starting in March they will be forced to bring down flights from nine a day to three a day. If flights to Dubai are forced to stop, they say, Israel must also insist on Emirati airlines halting flights from the city, as this will give those companies an unfair advantage.
“Israel’s commercial and national interests must be maintained,” the CEOs write. “Tens of thousands of passengers who bought tickets may find themselves stuck.”
A Jewish high school student says he couldn’t believe what was going on when a history teacher in a wealthy Alabama school system had classmates stand and give a stiff-armed Nazi salute during a lesson on the way symbols change.
Once he shared a video and photos of the incident on social media, Ephraim Tytell says, he received a reprimand from school administrators in Mountain Brook, a suburb of Birmingham.
“They proceeded to tell me that I’m making Mountain Brook look bad for uploading the video and sharing it and asked me to apologize to my teacher, which I refused to,” he tells WIAT-TV. “The day after, he made our class, and our class only, put up our phones and he moved me from sitting in the back of the class to right next to him.”
The only Jewish student in the @mtnbrookhs class reported that his teacher instructed his classmates to raise the Nazi salute.
The school’s response? Discipline the student. This absolutely outrageous situation demands a full investigation.https://t.co/bS1zVNo2Uu
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) February 9, 2022
On Tuesday, the school system issued a statement saying the video and photos shared online “are not representative of the lesson” and no one tried to teach students how to do a Nazi salute.
“Understanding the sensitive nature of this subject, Mountain Brook Schools has addressed the instructional strategy used with the teacher and does not condone the modeling of this salute when a picture or video could accurately convey the same message,” the statement said.
Israel’s National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata meets with US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman to discuss coordination on various security challenges, State Department spokesman Ned Price says.
These include Iran and “Russia’s unprovoked military build-up on Ukraine’s borders.”
Price says Sherman “reiterated the administration’s ironclad commitment to Israel’s security” and “emphasized the importance of Israelis and Palestinians enjoying equal measures of security, freedom, and prosperity, and reaffirmed the commitment of the United States to a two-state solution.”
Another construction worker has fallen to his death, a day after two others died in similar circumstances in Tel Aviv.
The man fell from a construction site in Jerusalem, and medical teams declared him dead.
Police are at the scene to investigate.
Germany’s foreign minister says that nuclear talks with Iran are entering a “final phase” and that, despite Israeli reservations, a return to a nuclear agreement will make the region safer.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock speaks at a joint press conference in Tel Aviv with her Israeli counterpart, Yair Lapid, during an official visit.
Her remarks come as negotiations between Iran and world powers reconvened this week in an effort to revive the 2015 nuclear accord that curbed Tehran’s nuclear program.
Lapid says that he and Baerbock discussed the nuclear talks and he presented her with Israel’s position “that a nuclear Iran endangers not only Israel, but the entire world.” He says that Iran is “an exporter of terror from Yemen to Buenos Aires” and that the agreement must take into account its regional aggression.
Baerbock says she is “convinced that a full restoration of the JCPOA would make the region more secure, including Israel, otherwise we would not be having these talks.”
She says the talks with Iran, to which Germany is a party, have reached a “very critical point” and that it was important for Iran to come back to the table “with a willingness to compromise and without maximum demands.”
“We want to do everything we can to ensure that with this agreement, Israel’s security is guaranteed,” Baerbock says.
NSO Group has sent a letter to the Calcalist newspaper warning it of potential legal action over its reports claiming NSO spyware was used to illegally hack the phones of numerous Israelis.
The company says the paper has published “sensationalist” claims without providing any evidence to back them up.
This morning Calcalist published an interview with an unnamed source “with very close knowledge” of the architecture of NSO’s Pegasus spyware, who claimed that the company’s tech can be configured to leave no footprints.
This, the paper says, means police logs of their usage of the software might not be trustworthy.
Defense Minister Benny Gantz is reviewing a proposal that will see a yeshiva at one illegal outpost shut down in return for a second outpost being officially recognized, Kan news reports.
The report says the plan would see the yeshiva at Homesh closed, and the outpost of Evyatar, near Nablus, authorized, with a yeshiva opened there.
Unnamed sourced told Kan that Gantz is weighing the proposal.
Under the terms of an agreement reached in late June, settlers left the Evyatar outpost peacefully and the area became a closed military zone, with the houses and roads remaining in place and a detachment of soldiers moving in.
A Yad Vashem review of tattoo stamps that were recently at the center of an uproar after being offered on auction as Auschwitz stamps has found that they likely were not used on Jewish inmates, Reuters reports.
The report, which is set to be submitted to the Tel Aviv District Court as part of the dispute over the auction, says the use of steel dies for tattooing prisoners was stopped fairly early during World War II, and thus was mostly used on non-Jewish political prisoners or captured combatants.
The tattoos given to Jews at Auschwitz were overwhelmingly done with styluses, found to be a quicker method.
The museum found that the stamps were actually more likely to date from 1949, after the war, and may have been used for livestock rather than people.
The auction was frozen by the court in November following an appeal from a Holocaust survivor group, as it reviews the proposed sale.
According to Reuters, auctioneer Meir Tzolman has insisted the stamps were certified as originating in Auschwitz.
Former prime minister Ehud Barak says the Shin Bet should be able to ascertain within less than a day whether phones of people allegedly hacked by police illegally were indeed targeted.
Barak tweets that the internal security agency has tools that should allow it to know within 12 hours whether a phone was accessed by NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware.
Barak says the agency should be able to check the phones of all 26 people named in Calcalist as hacking targets “within perhaps 48 hours.”
Barak says it’s “lamentable” that this has not yet been done, and calls on the government to do so now.
Britain says Russia needs to withdraw troops from its border with Ukraine to ease tensions between Moscow and the West over fears Moscow is planning to invade.
“We need to see the troops and the equipment stationed on the Ukrainian border moved elsewhere because at present it is in a very threatening posture,” British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss says at a press conference in Moscow.
Truss met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the latest in weeks of intensive negotiations between officials from Moscow and the West over European security and Ukraine tensions.
“Lavrov has said to me today that Russia has no plans to invade Ukraine but we need to see those words followed up by actions,” Truss says after the talks.
Leaders in Western capitals have been warning that Russia is preparing to escalate a separatist conflict in Ukraine after building up some 100,000 troops around its ex-Soviet neighbor.
The Shin Bet and police say they have identified and arrested four people from the Bedouin town of Segev Shalom on suspicion of assaulting a reporter in early January and burning his car during general unrest in southern Israel.
The four are aged 18-19. They are suspected of various violent incidents beyond the attack on the journalist, including rock-throwing and a Molotov cocktail attack on a police post.
The four are expected to face indictments on multiple counts of violence.
