Adiv Sterman is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
The Times of Israel liveblogged Wednesday’s events as they unfolded.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and government ministers convenes an urgent discussion on the deteriorating security situation in Jerusalem and along Route 443, following several incidents of stone-hurling and firebombing attacks on vehicles and passerby in recent weeks.
“The policy is zero tolerance for stone-throwing and zero tolerance for terrorism,” Netanyahu says at the meeting.
The prime minister orders the reinforcement of army units operating along Route 443, and vows to step up intelligence efforts along the entire length of the highway. He says authorities are examining the possibility of placing additional cameras and extra lighting in the area.
Netanyahu also says two additional Border Police companies and approximately 400 Israel Police personnel will be stationed in Jerusalem, according to the Prime Minister’s Office.
The prime minister stresses that he is looking to increase legal punishment for stone throwers, and says the rules of engagement for soldiers who encounter rock hurlers may be changed in an attempt to reduce such occurrences.
Yisrael Beytenu lawmaker Sharon Gal announces he is leaving politics, saying that he would put his talents to better use as a journalist.
Gal’s political exit comes less than half a year after he was elected.
“As a former journalist with an agenda, I was given an opportunity before the last election to try to advance it from within the Knesset as a member of the Yisrael Beytenu faction. I was happy about the opportunity and I used it in an optimal way during my tenure,” Gal says, according to daily newspaper Haaretz.
Gal, a journalist and TV personality, hosted an economics program on Channel 10 for a decade before leaving in 2013 amid allegations of sexual impropriety and harassment, though the case was eventually dropped by police due to lack of evidence. He also spent time as a correspondent for Haaretz.
MK Sharon Gal addresses the Israeli parliament during a debate on his “death sentence for terrorists” bill, July 15, 2015. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90
“I regret Sharon Gal’s decision to retire from the Knesset but I respect the fact that Gal is acting according to his conscience and out of a desire to bring his talents to expression in the best way possible in order to contribute to the State of Israel,” writes Yisrael Beytenu head Avigdor Liberman on his Facebook page.
Gal’s departure from the Knesset comes only hours after Yesh Atid MK Shai Piron, who previously served as education minister, announced this morning that he was leaving politics in order to take up a senior teaching position at a Sderot college.
Seven people are killed and 40 wounded in a rare car bombing in the Syrian city of Latakia, the coastal bastion of President Bashar Assad, state television says.
In a breaking news alert, the channel says “seven people died and more than 40 were wounded when a terrorist car bomb detonated in Hamam square in Latakia.”
Latakia, the heartland of the minority Alawite sect to which the Assad clan belongs, has been largely spared the violence that has wracked Syria since an uprising against its rule erupted in March 2011.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirms the death toll and says it was “the biggest car bomb attack in Latakia since the war began.”
“This is rare for Latakia city, which is usually hit by rockets,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman tells AFP.
Traffic on a street in Latakia, Syria. (YouTube/Reuters)
Rebels entrenched in the hilly terrain around Latakia regularly fire rockets and other missiles into the city.
Abdel Rahman says the car bomb detonated on the northern edges of the city and “wounded dozens, including four or five in critical condition.”
Many Syrians displaced by violence in neighboring regions have taken refuge in Latakia province and some businesses have moved to the relative safety of the area.
More than 240,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which has spiraled from an anti-government movement to a multi-front civil war.
— AFP
The Knesset approves the government’s decision to appoint Yaakov Litzman as Health Minister.
Litzman, of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, said last Thursday that he had received rabbinical approval to serve as health minister in the cabinet after he had so far served as deputy minister.
“I accept the decision by the Council of Torah Sages and have answered positively the request of the prime minister, and will thus soon serve as health minister,” he said.
United Torah Judaism MK Yaakov Litzman in the Knesset, September 15, 2014 (Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90)
His announcement came following a ruling by the High Court of Justice preventing deputy ministers from fulfilling the role of ministers. Litzman, while nominally a deputy minister, held a minister’s authority in the Health Ministry. Lawmakers from his party have previously avoided ministerial positions due to their community’s reluctance to grant full legitimacy to a secular Jewish state.
Likud MK Ofir Akunis is sworn as minister of science and technology after the Knesset approves his appointment.
Fifty-seven Knesset members vote in favor of the appointment and 33 against.
More than a dozen hard-line Iranian students unveil an anti-American plaque at the gate of the former US Embassy in Tehran.
The plaque, unveiled by the Basij paramilitary forces, carries a list of condemnations of America uttered by the Islamic republic’s late founder, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. During the gathering, the students set fire to US, British and Israeli flags.
Iran and the US have had no diplomatic relations since 1979, when Iranian students stormed the embassy and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
Hard-liners in Iran have stepped up displays of anti-American fervor since the signing of a landmark nuclear agreement with Washington and five world powers last month.
— AP
Turkey transfers two British journalists and their Iraqi translator who were arrested this week on terror charges to a new jail in the southern city of Adana, legal sources say.
The three, reporting for US-based media outlet Vice News, were detained on Monday and remanded in custody in the mainly Kurdish southeastern city of Diyarbakir in a case that has caused international concern.
They have been charged with “engaging in terror activity” on behalf of the Islamic State extremist group.
Vice News has condemned the charges as “baseless” and “alarmingly false.”
The three have now been transferred to a jail in Adana, the head of the Diyarbakir bar association Tahir Elci and legal sources tell AFP.
Elci says the reason given for the move was a lack of available English-speaking translators in Diyarbakir.
“This is another example of the mistreatment against the detainees,” Elci says.
Legal sources say that even though they were being held in Adana, the investigation would continue to be based in Diyarbakir — 500 kilometers (300 miles) northeast.
Their detention has drawn criticism from across the world and amplified concerns about declining press freedoms in Turkey.
Vice News has named the British journalists as Jake Hanrahan and Philip Pendlebury.
The team had been visiting the region as the government wages a relentless campaign against Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants, with several local Kurdish officials arrested and accused of supporting declarations of self rule.
A Turkish official on Tuesday denied Ankara played a role in the arrest of the Vice team and said the government is “not pleased” they are being held.
— AFP
Saudi Arabia’s top cleric hits out at Iranian film “Muhammad,” describing its portrayal of the prophet’s childhood as a “hostile act” and a “distortion” of Islam.
Iran’s most expensive movie, which opened nationwide in the Shiite Islamic republic last week, depicts the prophet on screen, an act that is prohibited in Sunni Islam.
“This is an obscene work… It is a distortion of Islam,” Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Abulaziz al-Shaikh tells Al-Hayat newspaper. “It is a hostile act against Islam.
“This is a mockery of the prophet and a degradation of his status,” he says.
While Iran has denounced cartoons of the prophet like those published by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Shiites are generally more relaxed than Sunnis about depiction of religious figures.
Directed by Majid Majidi, the visually stunning 171-minute film cost around $40 million (36 million euros), partly funded by the state, and took more than seven years to complete.
Majidi says the aim of his work, the first part of a trilogy, is to reclaim the rightful image of Islam, which he said extremists have distorted.
An Indian soldier and a suspected militant are killed during a gunbattle in Indian Kashmir, the latest clash in the restive Himalayan region, a police officer says.
Acting on a tip-off, government forces confronted at least one militant inside a house in the village of Ladoora, 70 kilometers (43 miles) northwest of the main city of Srinagar.
“One militant was killed and we had a fatal casualty of a soldier in the initial stage of the gunbattle,” Gharib Das, deputy inspector general of police for the area, tells AFP.
Das said it was unclear if more militants were in the area.
— AFP
Extreme right-wing activist Noam Federman is questioned by police on suspicion of inciting to violence and racism. The interrogation comes in response to a Facebook post by Federman following an attack in the West Bank Palestinian village of Duma a month ago.
Federman had cited the biblical commentator Don Isaac Abravanel, who posited that the children of enemies must be slain in their sleep, Israel Radio reports.
Saad Dawabsha and his 18-month-old son Ali were killed last month when their home in Duma was firebombed in what is believed to be a nationalist attack by Jewish extremists. The Hebrew words “Revenge” and “Long live the king messiah” were spray-painted on walls at the site of that attack, alongside a Star of David.
Police officers are attacked with stones after rescuing residents from a burning building in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya.
No injuries are reported among police forces or local residents. Security forces are searching the area for the perpetrators of the attack.
A United States man sentenced to more than 17 years in federal prison on terrorism-related charges is appealing his conviction.
A lawyer for 32-year-old Tarek Mehanna, of Sudbury, says in a filing in a US District Court in Boston that Mehanna’s sentence should be vacated because prosecutors withheld information about a key government witness during his 2011 trial.
An appeals court upheld Mehanna’s conviction on providing material support to al-Qaeda. The US Supreme Court last year decided not to review the case.
Prosecutors said he traveled to Yemen seeking terrorist training and intended to fight US soldiers in Iraq. When that failed, they said, he returned home and promoted violent jihad online.
Mehanna’s lawyers said he didn’t give any tangible support to al-Qaeda, and his online activities were protected free speech.
— AP
Senate Democrats rally the 34 votes they need to keep the Iran nuclear deal alive in Congress, handing President Barack Obama a major foreign policy victory.
Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland became the crucial 34th vote Wednesday morning, declaring the agreement is the best way to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Congress is to vote later this month on a resolution disapproving the deal, which is unanimously opposed by Republicans, who call it a dangerous giveaway to Iran.
Obama has vowed to veto the resolution if it passes. It would take 34 votes to uphold his veto, and Democrats now have those in hand.
The agreement — signed by Iran, the US and five other world powers — seeks to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for billions of dollars in relief from sanctions.
— AP
The discovery of natural gas deposits off the coast of Egypt will not undermine the business transactions between the country’s private sector and Israel, Sherif Ismail, Egypt’s minister of petroleum and mineral resources, says.
Egypt’s new natural gas bonanza is causing an uproar in Israel, with energy stocks plummeting and recriminations over indecisiveness and infighting that have delayed production from the country’s own gas fields.
The government is currently struggling to get parliament to approve its natural gas business plan, but observers fear Israel may need to reassess everything now that Egypt, which had been cast as both an export destination and a partner, may have found its own independent solution.
Female drivers in Iran’s capital could have their cars impounded by police if they are caught driving with a poorly fixed veil or without their heads covered, a police chief says.
“If a (female) driver in a car is poorly veiled or has taken her veil off, the vehicle will be seized in accordance with the law,” the head of Tehran’s traffic police, General Teymour Hosseini, was quoted as saying by the official ISNA news agency.
He adds that any woman who had her car seized would need to obtain a court order before getting it back.
Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, wearing a veil in public has been mandatory for all women in Iran.
But recent decades have seen a loosening of the rules governing female dress and many women in Tehran dress in a way that is far removed from the strict clothing regulations in other observant Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia.
Head-to-toe veiled Iranian women attend a polling station to vote for the presidential and municipal councils elections in Tehran, Iran, Friday, June 14, 2013. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
“Unfortunately, some streets of the capital have come to resemble fashion salons,” Iran’s judiciary chief Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani said this week, questioning the “tolerance” that has led to “such a situation.”
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has since his June 2013 election overseen some political and social reform but much of the country’s political establishment remains deeply conservative.
— AFP
At least 12 Syrian migrants trying to reach Greece drown when two boats sink in Turkish waters, the Turkish coastguard and media say, as an image of a toddler’s lifeless body washed ashore sparked horrified reactions on social media.
The Turkish coastguard says in a statement that two boats had sunk after separately setting off from Turkey’s Bodrum peninsula for the Greek Aegean island of Kos early Wednesday.
The corpses of 12 migrants, including five children and one woman, were found and 15 people were rescued, with some surviving after reaching the shore in life jackets.
The coastguard, backed by helicopters, was continuing its search for three people still missing, the statement said.
— AFP
Lebanon’s divided government appears powerless to address a growing protest campaign that began over a trash crisis and escalated with activists occupying the environment ministry.
On Tuesday night, police forcibly evicted several dozen protesters who had occupied part of the ministry in a surprise bid to force the minister’s resignation.
The protest was an escalation of the “You Stink” campaign, which started over a rubbish collection crisis but has become a movement targeting Lebanon’s stagnant and corrupt political class.
In a sign of the government’s ongoing impotence, the parliament on Wednesday failed for the 28th time to elect a new president.
A Lebanese policeman, right, tries to drags away an anti-government activist during a sit-in protest against Environment Minister Mohammed Machnouk, inside the Environment Ministry, in downtown Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, September 1, 2015. (Hassan Ammar/AP)
The post has been empty since May 2014, but the legislature is so politically divided that every attempt to elect a replacement has failed.
The presidential void is just one example of the government paralysis that has increasingly been the target of the “You Stink” campaign.
Its demands have expanded beyond a solution to the waste crisis to calls for the environment minister’s resignation, new parliamentary elections and accountability for violence against protesters.
On Wednesday, “You Stink” activist Assaad Thebian said the campaign would continue after the environment ministry sit-in, which lasted eight hours before being broken up by police.
“It seems that the government is persisting in ignoring the demands of the Lebanese people,” he said.
“The leaders are in a state of political bankruptcy, incapable of taking any decision.”
— AFP
US Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking in Phildelphia, says Iran had already in 2013 enriched enough uranium to produce several nuclear bombs. Kerry also acknowledges that Netanyahu was correct in his assessment that Iran’s breakout time for a bomb was only a matter of months.
The secretary of state says sanctions alone were failing to stop Iran’s “relentless march toward nuclear capabilities.” He says the nuclear negotiations were devised in order to halt Iran’s nuclear activities.
He says that Iran has complied with the terms of an interim nuclear agreement signed in Vienna for more than 19 months.
Kerry claims that the breakout time for bomb on Iran’s part used to be about two months, but thanks to the recently signed nuclear deal, is now close to year. He adds that Iran will never be permitted to produce weapons grade plutonium.
Kerry stresses that the UN Security Council members voted unanimously in favor of the nuclear deal with Iran, and lists various experts from different fields who back the agreement. He adds that the US would suffer greatly in the international arena if the deal were not implemented.
The sanctions on Iran did convince the country’s diplomats to approach the negotiation table, Kerry says, but only after talks began did Iran begin to significantly curb its nuclear program.
If the deal falls, Iran will be closer to a bomb, Kerry adds. Most countries will not reinstate sanctions if the deal is struck down, he says.
Kerry says the US has provided $20 billion to Israel, as well as $3 billion to develop the Iron Dome defense system.
He says the US is determined to assure that Israel remains secure against all threats leveled against it.
“Our support for Israel remains rock solid,” Kerry says.
Kerry says he doesn’t question Netanyahu’s concerns regarding the nuclear agreement, but says the deal actually secures Israel.
He says the deal is based on truth, not trust.
If Iran breaks the agreement, the US will ensure that the Islamic Republic regrets ever backtracking on the deal, Kerry says.
Stray bullets apparently from a Hamas training camp in the Gaza Strip hit an Israeli home in a town adjacent to the Palestinian enclave, causing damage but no injuries.
One of the bullets shattered the window of a home in the Kibbutz Netiv Ha’asara and hit a television while two children, aged 6 and 9, were watching it.
The other hit a wall in the home just north of the Strip. No injuries are reported.
ירי נשק קל לעבר נתיב העשרה. הטלוויזיה נפגעה בזמן שילדי המשפחה צפו בה. קרדיט: שיטור קהילתי חוף אשקלון pic.twitter.com/n0kcYx5Um9
— שי ויספיש (@shai0527) September 2, 2015
Initial reports indicated the two bullets were stray sniper bullets that originated from a Hamas training camp on the other side of the border, the IDF.
The United Nations says it has reached agreement with Yemen’s government and a Saudi-led military coalition on increasing the flow of badly needed goods like food and fuel to Yemen.
The impoverished Arab country relies on imports for about 90 percent of its supplies, but it has been brought to the brink of famine as months of fighting have held up commercial imports and aid deliveries.
Fighters against Shiite rebels known as Houthis gather at a street in the port city of Aden, Yemen, Thursday, July 16, 2015. (AP Photo/Abo Muhammed)
The UN’s regional humanitarian coordinator for the Yemen crisis confirmed through a spokeswoman Wednesday that an agreement has been reached on a mechanism to verify and inspect both aid and commercial goods.
It is not yet clear when the mechanism will be operational because of funding and other issues.
A Saudi-led, US-backed coalition has been launching airstrikes against Shiite Houthi rebels since March.
— AP
As US President Obama clinched enough Senators to sustain his veto of a bill trying to kill the Iranian nuclear deal, sources close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu say that a “clear majority” of lawmakers oppose the deal, calling on more legislators to join the no-deal camp.
“The prime minister said before addressing the Congress in March that it is his duty to present Israel’s grave concerns about the deal with Iran to the American people and their representatives,” the sources tell The Times of Israel. “The American people get it. They understand the dangers to Israel. They understand the dangers to the United States. That’s why a clear majority believe the deal should be rejected, which is also reflected in Congress, where a clear majority seems prepared to reject the deal.”
The stronger the opposition in Congress to the deal, the stronger the message to Iran and to America’s allies in the region and the greater the likelihood that that message will be reflected in US policy moving forward, the sources say.
Netanyahu has no doubt that US-Israel relations will remain strong despite Jerusalem’s bitter anti-deal campaign, the sources add.
— Raphael Ahren
French judges investigating claims that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was murdered have closed the case without bringing any charges, a prosecutor says.
“At the end of the investigation… it has not been demonstrated that Mr Yasser Arafat was murdered by polonium-210 poisoning,” the three judges rule, according to a statement from the prosecutor from the court in Nanterre near Paris.
Arafat died in Percy military hospital near Paris aged 75 in November 2004 after developing stomach pains while at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
His widow Suha has maintained he was poisoned, possibly by highly radioactive polonium.
But the judges ruled there was “not sufficient evidence of an intervention by a third party who could have attempted to take his life,” the prosecutor says.
A file picture taken in the West Bank city of Ramallah on June 7, 2002, shows Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat attending Friday Muslim prayers. (AFP PHOTO / Thomas COEX)
Suha’s lawyer, Francis Szpiner, also announced the judges’ decision on Twitter.
She filed the murder case in 2012 at the Nanterre court. The same year, Arafat’s tomb in Ramallah was opened for a few hours to allow three teams of French, Swiss and Russian investigators to collect around 60 samples.
Three French judges concluded their investigations in April and sent their findings to the Nanterre prosecutor, who recommended in July that the case be dropped.
Suha Arafat in 2004. (Sharon Perry/Flash90/File)
A center in the Swiss city of Lausanne had tested biological samples taken from Arafat’s belongings that were given to his widow after his death, and found “abnormal levels of polonium.”
It stopped short of saying that he had been poisoned by the substance.
French experts found that the isotopes polonium-210 and lead-210, found in Arafat’s grave and in the samples, were of “an environmental nature,” Nanterre prosecutor Catherine Denis said in April.
Lawyers for Arafat’s widow accused the judges of closing the investigation too quickly and called for more experts to be questioned.
— AFP
Former Dimona nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, jailed for 18 years for treason and espionage after leaking Israel’s nuclear secrets to a British newspaper in 1986, spoke to Channel 2 and recalled how while in London, he had been drawn in by a Mossad agent named Cheryl Bentov, who operated under the alias “Cindy,” and how he was later caught by Israeli authorities in Rome.
“I started speaking with her,” Vanunu tells Channel 2, explaining that if she had approached him he would have grown immediately suspicious.
He stresses that he did not “fall in love with her,” but was attracted nevertheless.
Ex-nuclear spy Mordechai Vanunu attending a hearing at the Supreme Court in Jerusalem in 2010. Vanunu has been petitioning for years against a warrant preventing him from leaving Israel. (photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Vanunu also added that he believed Mossad agents had been placed all throughout the London neighborhood where he met “Cindy.”
The full interview is set to be broadcast on Friday evening.
Medical officials say bomb blasts at mosque in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, kill at least 20 people.
— AP
A Satmar Hasidic school in a London borough apologizes for using the term “goyim” on worksheets following a newspaper report that its preschoolers were being taught that non-Jews are evil.
An article published Tuesday in the Independent newspaper, a major British daily, focused on a worksheet on the Holocaust used by the young students at the Beis Rochel D’Satmar Girls’ School in Hackney, in northeast London, in which Nazis are referred to only with the term for non-Jews that some deem offensive.
The worksheet is in Yiddish, and the newspaper received an independent translation of the worksheet. The first question reads: “What have the evil goyim (non-Jews) done with the synagogues and cheders [Jewish primary schools]?” The answer in the completed worksheet reads “Burned them.”
“The language we used was not in any way intended to cause offense, now this has been brought to our attention, we will endeavor to use more precise language in the future,” a school spokesman told the newspaper.
The spokesman told the London Jewish Chronicle that the term goyim explicitly meant Nazis.
“The leaflet that the Independent refers to was handed out on the 21 Kislev, when the Satmar Jews celebrate the rescue of their founding rabbi from Bergen-Belsen,” the spokesman, Shimon Cohen, told the Chronicle.
“The questions were only talking about the specific event, but there is no Yiddish word for Nazis. The suggestion that children are being taught that non-Jews are evil is nonsense and simply false. They are being taught that Nazis are evil.”
— JTA
Europe’s Schengen passport-free zone has “fallen apart” amid the sharp escalation of a refugee and migrant crisis, Slovakia’s foreign minister says.
“Schengen has de facto fallen apart,” Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak tells reporters in Bratislava, adding that Slovakia was prepared to offer material and personnel support to beef up security along the 28-member European Union’s border.
Record numbers of refugees have entered the EU by sea and land this year as hundreds of thousands flee conflicts in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
“Under normal circumstances, it’s difficult to get a Schengen visa, and now there are tens of thousands of people walking around here without anyone checking them,” Lajcak says.
“So, do we have Schengen, or don’t we?”
Since its creation in 1995, the Schengen area — named after a border town in Luxembourg — has abolished passport controls for travel between 22 of the EU’s 28 countries, plus non-EU Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
A Border Police force opens fire at a Palestinian man who attempted to hurl an explosive device at their position near Bethlehem in the West Bank.
No Israelis were injured in the incident, and the Palestinian man, who suffered wounds to his lower extremities, was evacuated to a nearby hospital for treatment, and army spokesperson says.
