Tamar Pileggi is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
The Times of Israel liveblogged Tuesday’s events as they unfolded.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will not sign on to a global UN migration pact.
The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, which will not be legally binding, was finalized under UN auspices in July. It is due to be formally approved at a meeting Morocco next month.
In a statement, Netanyahu says he instructed the Foreign Ministry not to sign the pact in Marrakesh, saying Israel is “committed to maintaining our borders against illegal infiltrators. That is what we have done in the past and will constitute to do.”
Australia, Austria, Poland, and the United States also say they will not sign the migration agreement.
In 2016, all 193 UN member states adopted a declaration saying no country can manage international migration on its own, and agreed to launch a process leading to the adoption of a global compact in 2018.
Human Rights Watch is urging Booking.com to follow the example of Airbnb and withdraw listings for rentals located in settlements in the West Bank.
Airbnb announced yesterday that it will remove settlement listings, just ahead of the release of an HRW report criticizing them.
The US-based rights group issued its report and called on Booking.com to follow Airbnb’s “positive step.”
“By ending its brokering of rentals in illegal settlements on land off-limits to Palestinians, Airbnb has taken a stand against discrimination and land confiscation and theft,” Omar Shakir, HRW’s director for Israel and the Palestinian territories, tells AFP.
“It is an important and welcome step and we encourage other companies like Booking.com to follow their lead and stop listing in settlements,” he says.
Israel strongly denounced Airbnb’s decision and threatened legal action against the company, while Palestinian officials have welcomed the move.
— AFP
A bill that will allow Culture Minister Miri Regev to withhold public funding for cultural organizations “that are working against the principles of the state” is approved by the Knesset’s Culture and Sports Committee.
The controversial bill that was initiated by Regev and backed by the Finance Ministry will now be put before the Knesset plenum for a second and third reading before becoming law.
Denmark is sending its ambassador back to Tehran, after he was recalled over Copenhagen’s allegations about an Iranian plot to kill an opposition activist in Denmark.
Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen says Ambassador Danny Annan is returning to Iran “to intensify diplomacy and coordinate closely with our European partners.”
Samuelsen says the European Union had “a renewed discussion” about “common steps against Iran.” He did not elaborate.
Danes say Iran was planning to kill a member of the group that Tehran has blamed for the September 22 terror attack that killed at least 25 people. The group, called Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz, condemned the violence and said it was not involved.
Iran strongly denies the plot allegation.
Annan is expected to arrive in Tehran later today.
— AP
Ex-defense minister and Yisrael Beytenu party chief Avigdor Liberman is accusing the government of attempting to hobble his bill that aims to make it easier for Israel to sentence convicted Palestinian attackers of civilians and soldiers to death.
Liberman, who last week resigned last week over disagreements with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the Gaza ceasefire, says the Constitution Law and Justice Committee’s decision not to hold a vote on his controversial bill is “a clear disruption by the coalition to the voting public and the bereaved families.”
The bill, which is sponsored by Yisrael Beytenu, passed a preliminary reading in Knesset in January.
However, committee chair, MK Nissan Slomiansky of the Jewish Home party, dismissed the accusation, and said the legislation could not be advanced as usual because Yisrael Beytenu is now in the opposition.
The Palestinian teen who injured four police officers in a stabbing attack in Jerusalem last week has died of his injuries sustained in the assault.
The official Palestinian Authority news outlet Wafa identifies the attacker as 17-year-old Abdul Rahman Ali Abu Jamal from East Jerusalem.
Police said Jamal stabbed and lightly injured three officers last Wednesday night at a police station the in Jerusalem’s Armon HaNatziv neighborhood, before he was shot. A fourth officer was injured while arresting him.
Jamal was taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital with serious injuries.
The Armon HaNatziv neighborhood, some of which is in former no-man’s land between East and West Jerusalem, has been the scene of several attacks in past years, including during a wave of stabbings in 2015 and 2016.
Romania’s government says that diplomat Mihnea Constanescu, praised internationally for his efforts to combat anti-Semitism, has died. He was 57.
The foreign ministry says Constantinescu, who advised Romanian prime ministers from 1990-2012, died Sunday in Nice, France, after a long illness.
US-based Jewish rights group Simon Wiesenthal Center calls Constantinescu one of the “great figures of our generation in the fight against anti-Semitism.” Constantinescu chaired the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, contributing to the adoption of a working definition of anti-Semitism that year.
Calin Popescu Tariceanu, premier from 2004 to 2008, describes Constantinescu as “Romania’s best ever public servant.” He says his natural modesty and discretion barred him from seeking high office.
Constantinescu helped Romania prepare for joining NATO in 2004 and the European Union three years later. In 2001, he played a key role when Romania chaired the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
His last job was as a government energy security adviser.
There was no word about survivors. Funeral plans were not made public.
— AP
The EU’s top diplomat Federica Mogherini says she is “extremely worried” about the fate of a major US-Russia nuclear missile control treaty, warning the security of Europe could be at risk.
Last month, Washington, DC announced it was pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) over Russia’s deployment of a missile system that Western powers say breaches the 1987 accord.
The Kremlin has warned of a new arms race, and as she convened a meeting of EU defense ministers Mogherini expressed concern, calling for talks to save the agreement.
“If we go towards the dismantling of this agreement, Europe’s security is to be put at risk and we do not want to see European territory go back to being a battlefield for other powers as it has been for so long in the past,” she tells reporters.
“We don’t want to go back to those kind of tensions, to that kind of situation and we still hope there is a space for saving the agreement and implementing it,” she said.
While US President Donald Trump’s administration has signaled it will withdraw from the treaty, it has not taken steps to put the decision into practice.
— AFP
A man is stabbed in the face and lightly injured in a suspected terror attack near the Walaja Junction, south of Jerusalem, medics say.
Border Police officers are responding to the incident, according to the military.
The victim is approximately 35 years old. Medics from the Magen David Adom ambulance service are treating him, a spokesperson says.
— Judah Ari Gross
Large numbers of security forces are searching the area near the Palestinian town of Beit Jala for an assailant who stabbed an Israeli man in the face, police say in a statement.
Magen David Adom paramedics are treating the victim for light injuries at the scene of the attack, in between Beit Jala and the nearby settlement of Har Gilo.
Iran’s capabilities in Syria are “far away” from what the Islamic republic had wanted them to be as a result of “ongoing” Israeli military action, IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot says.
The army chief praises the IDF Northern Command for its effort in blocking Iranian forces from establishing a permanent military presence in southern Syria, near the Israeli border, and from transferring precision-guided missiles to the Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon.
“The fact that their abilities are far away from what Iran and terror groups desired is the result of high-quality, ongoing operational activity,” Eisenkot says, while visiting the Northern Command’s Bashan Division in the Golan Heights.
“The IDF will continue to thwart these efforts [by Iran and Hezbollah], while preserving the security situation in the north in the long term, from a dedication to the defense of citizens of the State of Israel,” he says.
Eisenkot is accompanied by Northern Command chief Maj. Gen. Yoel Strick and other senior officers, the Israel Defense Forces says.
In recent years, Israel has identified Iranian efforts to set up a forward operating base in southern Syria as a major strategic threat to the Jewish state and vowed to take action to prevent it.
The Israeli military has conducted hundreds of airstrikes and other operations against Iranian targets in Syria, according to Israeli officials and foreign media reports.
— Judah Ari Gross
Thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip turn out to a rally organized by Fatah dissidents to mark the 14th anniversary of the death of former Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat.
Many of the Palestinians participating in the rally are waving yellow Fatah flags and are holding up posters of Arafat and Mohammed Dahlan, a rival of PA President Mahmoud Abbas who currently resides in the United Arab Emirates.
— Adam Rasgon
An 11-year-old boy from Kiryat Yam is critically injured after falling out of a window on the 12th floor.
Neighbors tell Hadashot TV news that it looked like the boy was trying to get to the balcony from his bedroom window.
The boy was rushed to the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa in critical condition where he is undergoing emergency surgery.
Police have opened an investigation into the incident.
A former Nazi concentration camp guard on trial on hundreds of counts of being an accessory to murder says that although he served more than two years at Stutthof he was unaware prisoners were being executed there.
Johann Rehbogen tells the Muenster state court he knew “the treatment by the Nazis led to unspeakable suffering of the prisoners and led to many deaths.”
But news agency dpa reports that the 94-year-old said in a written response to a question read by his attorney: “It isn’t the case that I had any knowledge of concrete operations.”
More than 60,000 people were killed in a gas chamber at Stutthof, shot or killed by other methods. Prosecutors argue that Rehbogen is an accessory because he helped the camp operate from June 1942 to September 1944.
— AP
The 11-year-old boy from Kiryat Yam who was critically injured after falling out of a window on the 12th floor, has died of his injuries according to Rambam Hospital.
Neighbors told Hadashot TV news that it looked like the boy was trying to get to the balcony from his bedroom window.
Police have opened an investigation into the incident.
An international rights group says Egypt is committing “shocking violations” against children, including torture and enforced disappearances.
Amnesty International says it has documented at least six children, including a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old, who were tortured in custody, and 12 who were subjected to enforced disappearances since 2015. It did not give the ages of the other children.
Citing the children’s families, Amnesty says the six were “severely beaten, given electric shocks on their genitalia and other parts of their body or suspended by their limbs.” Some of the torture was aimed at forcing the children to confess to crimes they had not committed, it said in a joint report with the Egyptian Front for Human Rights.
Egypt has waged an unprecedented crackdown on dissent since President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi led the military overthrow of an elected but divisive Islamist president in 2013. Thousands of people have been jailed, with many held without charge or trial. Rights groups say torture is widespread in Egyptian detention facilities, allegations denied by the government.
A spokesman for Egypt’s Interior Ministry, which oversees police, did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
— AP
The Senior Appointments Advisory Committee confirms the appointment of Deputy IDF Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi to be the military’s next commanding officer.
Former defense minister Avigdor Liberman tapped Kochavi for the post last month, before his sudden resignation last week.
Kochavi will take over from Gadi Eisenkot, whose four-year term as chief of staff is due to end on December 31, 2018.
Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked expresses her lack of confidence that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be able to keep his coalition afloat with 61 seats out of the Knesset’s 120.
“The prime minister chose to govern with a narrow coalition, so I wish him the best of luck,” she says at a conference at Bar Ilan University.
Shaked says her Jewish Home party decided to remain in the coalition to prevent early elections in Israel.
“It’s not right for the country to go to elections right now,” she says. “It’s true that we are facing major challenges, and so we decided that the right way forward was to give in.”
“In life and in politics, you have to know that you don’t always get what you want,” Shaked adds.
A woman implicated in the massive diamond smuggling operation run by Russian-Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev jumped to her death this afternoon from the Diamond Tower in Ramat Gan.
The woman was employed at Leviev’s company, LLD Diamonds, and reports in Hebrew-language media say she had been questioned by police earlier this month about her boss, who is suspected of smuggling hundreds of millions of shekels’ worth of gems into Israel over the last several years.
It was not immediately clear if the woman was a suspect in the investigation.
Her name and other identifying details are being withheld by police due to the ongoing investigation.
LLD Diamonds issues a statement confirming the woman’s death, and slam police for violating her rights during her interrogation.
“We will assist in the investigation into her death, in order to help put an end to this phenomenon of police trampling the rights of interogees, causing irreversible damage for the sake of media headlines,” the company says in a statement.
A suicide bomber targeted a gathering of hundreds of Islamic scholars in the Afghan capital earlier today, killing at least 50 people as Muslims around the world marked the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.
Public Health Ministry spokesman Wahid Majroh says another 83 people were wounded in the attack, with 20 of them in critical condition and the toll likely to rise.
The suicide bomber was able to sneak into a wedding hall in Kabul where hundreds of Muslim religious scholars and clerics had gathered to mark the holiday. No one immediately claimed the attack, but both the Taliban and a local Islamic State affiliate have targeted religious scholars aligned with the government in the past.
— AP
Russia failed on Tuesday in its bid to stall the global chemical warfare watchdog’s controversial new power to apportion blame for attacks like those in Syria.
After a bitter war of words, states approve the 2019 budget for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which includes funding for the new role.
They also shoot down a proposal by Russia and China to set up an “expert group” which the West said would have effectively blocked the new powers.
In June the OPCW approved a British-backed move to allow the body to attribute blame for chemical attacks. Previously it could only confirm whether or not toxic arms had been used.
“A clear majority against an attempt to wreck the historic June decision,” British ambassador to the OPCW Peter Wilson says on Twitter. “An overwhelming result, which clearly says #NoToChemicalWeapons.”
Applause broke out at the meeting in The Hague after member states voted 99 to 27 in favor of the 2019 budget.
It was the first time the OPCW had ever voted on the budget, after Russia and Iran, which both oppose the new attribution powers, insisted on a vote.
— AFP
Amnesty International says several activists imprisoned in Saudi Arabia, including a number of women, have been beaten and tortured during interrogation.
Saudi Arabia has detained at least 10 women and seven men since May on vague national security allegations related to their human rights work. Those detained include Loujain al-Hathloul, Eman al-Nafjan, and Aziza al-Yousef, who had campaigned for the right to drive before the decades-long ban was lifted in June.
Amnesty says that according to three testimonies it obtained, some of the activists were repeatedly tortured by electrocution and flogging, leaving some unable to walk or stand properly.
In one instance, an activist was hung from the ceiling. Another testimony said one of the detained women was subjected to sexual harassment by interrogators wearing face masks.
— AP
Russia has offered Israel to broker a deal that would see all Iranian forces removed from Syria in exchange for eased US sanctions against the Islamic republic, Channel 10 news reports.
According to the report, Netanyahu told lawmakers at a closed-door Knesset committee meeting last week that Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested the idea to him.
The report does not say when Putin made the offer. The two leaders recently met in Paris on the sidelines of WWI commemorations.
The Israeli Police say it has determined that the stabbing earlier this afternoon near the Palestinian town of Beit Jala, in which an Israeli man was lightly injured, was a terror attack.
“Following an investigation of the event and a review of the findings at the scene, the Israel Police believes this was a nationalistically motivated stabbing attack,” police say in a statement.
The suspected terrorist fled the scene following the attack south of Jerusalem, police say.
The search for him continues.
— Judah Ari Gross
President Donald Trump acknowledged Tuesday that Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman could have known of the murder of a dissident journalist — but said there would be no fallout anyway for Saudi-US relations.
“It could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event –- maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” Trump says in a statement.
“We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” he says. “The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia.”
The gruesome murder of Khashoggi, who vanished after being lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, has hugely embarrassed Washington. The killing torpedoed a powerful PR campaign led by the crown prince to show that the conservative Islamic state has embarked on a new reformist path.
— AFP
The US says it has placed a network of Russian and Iranian companies on an international blacklist for shipping oil to Syria in violation of US sanctions.
Officials say the network helps fuel the Syrian war effort of President Bashar Assad while providing revenue for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
Placement on the list blocks any US assets and prohibits American entities or citizens from dealing with the companies.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says in announcing the names that the nine firms and people being added to the list are “critical actors” in a scheme to support Assad.
Those added to the list include a Syrian national and his Russia-based company along with a subsidiary of the Russian Energy Ministry.
— AP
Two people were killed this evening in a car crash between a truck and a passenger vehicle on Route 6 near Petah Tikva.
Eyewitnesses say a Kia Picanto crashed into a truck while traveling north on Route 6, just after the Qesem interchange. Half of the compact car and the two passengers inside were trapped underneath the truck. Paramedics declared both dead at the scene.
Route 6 northbound and the Qasem exit on Route 5 have been blocked to all traffic. Police are urging drivers in the area to use alternate routes.
בעקבות התאונה: כביש 6 מחלף קסם לצפון נחסם לתנועה pic.twitter.com/iIi02L6QO3
— מעריב אונליין (@MaarivOnline) November 20, 2018
Vacation rental company Booking.com is indicating that it will not be following in the footsteps of Airbnb in banning listings for rentals in West Bank settlements, despite pressure from rights groups.
Human Rights Watch called on the Netherlands-based company to exclude settlements from its platform, saying that it had 26 properties in settlements that are on land Israel acknowledges is privately owned by Palestinians.
In a statement to AFP, Booking.com signals that it will not be changing its policies, saying that it permits “all accommodation providers worldwide to list on our platform as long as they are in compliance with applicable laws.”
“Everything we do in terms of how we display information is always in accordance with local laws to provide transparency to anybody looking for accommodation on our site,” the statement says.
The White House says the US is opposing the Russian nominee to lead the international police organization Interpol, citing Russian “abuses.”
National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis says the US “strongly endorses” Interpol’s current interim president, South Korea’s Kim Jong Yang, to hold the post permanently. He is running against Interpol vice president Alexander Prokopchuk, a general in the Russian Interior Ministry.
Marquis is outlining the US opposition to Prokopchuk in a tweet, saying “the Russian government abuses INTERPOL’s processes to harass its political opponents.”
Prominent Kremlin critics have raised alarm that the Russian official is close to President Vladimir Putin, and have pointed to Russian attempts to use Interpol to pursue opponents of Putin’s government.
Interpol’s general assembly is expected to elect its new president tomorrow in Dubai.
— AP
Knesset members advance a bill that would give Israeli authorities the power to ban entry to all educational frameworks any child or person who has not been vaccinated against a disease when there is a national concern over an outbreak of the illness.
MKs back the the so-called “Vaccination Law” by 115 to zero in its preliminary reading, allowing lawmakers to prepare the bill in committee for three further readings.
The law, if authorized in all votes, would apply to all schools — from kindergartens through universities — and comes in response to an outbreak of measles in Israel, which was blamed on those who were not immunized against the disease. Hundreds fell ill with the infectious virus this year, and an 18-month-old toddler died in Jerusalem, the first such death from measles in 15 years.
The bill proposes that “in circumstances when there is a concern of an outbreak of disease against which there is a routine vaccination, educational institutes will prevent the entry to the institute any child, teacher or other person who is not vaccinated against the disease, according to the directions of the director-general of the Health Ministry, for a suitable period.”
— Raoul Wootliff
