Rockets, exams and prisoners

A late-night interception of rockets fired toward Eilat and the Education Ministry’s announcement it would cancel a nationwide standardized test in the upcoming school year poach some of the spotlight, as Tuesday’s Hebrew dailies continue to focus on the diplomatic issues of settlement building and prisoner releases.

Three rockets fired at Israel’s southernmost city lead Yedioth Ahronoth‘s front page. At “close to 1 a.m. the siren shook the vacation town, filled these days with families and tourists,” the paper writes. No injuries or damage were reported.

According to the daily, a total of three rockets were fired from the Sinai Peninsula toward the city. Two of them were intercepted by the Iron Dome platform stationed near Eilat, and the third landed in an unpopulated area outside the city.

The Iron Dome battery protecting Eilat, Yedioth reminds its readers, was deployed only last month due to “growing fear of terror attacks from jihadist terror groups that took over the peninsula.” It also notes that the city’s airport was shut down for two hours last week over security concerns.

“The Education Ministry canceled the nationwide MEIZAV tests,” Haaretz‘s headline reads, as it reports on a move meant to reduce the amount of standardized testing in the country.

According to the ministry’s announcement, the exams (usually held every other year in elementary and middle schools and run by the state), will be put on hold in the upcoming school year. Rather, the paper says, schools will be asked to examine their own students and evaluate them in the same subjects (Hebrew, math and English).

The daily quotes from the Facebook page of Education Minister Shai Piron, where he wrote his reasoning for the drastic change: “Because education isn’t about measuring [test scores] but about learning.”

The daily reports that ministry also announced it would look “for alternative methods” to evaluate schools that won’t force teachers and students to spend all their time preparing for the next exam and will allow them to teach and study what they’re supposed to.

Most of Maariv‘s front page is dedicated to the upcoming release of 26 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, and to the bereaved families’ dismay at hearing of the release of their relatives’ killers from the media instead of from the Israeli authorities.

The paper reports that some of the prisoners set to be released later tonight were decided on by a special ministerial committee headed by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, and weren’t the names presented to them by Shin Bet head Yoram Cohen. The ministers’ deviation from the recommendations was part of “Israel’s will to strengthen [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas,” an unnamed source was quoted as explaining.

The 26 prisoners set for release Tuesday night are the first group in a four-phase trust-building gesture from Israel toward the Palestinian Authority, during which Jerusalem will let 104 pre-Oslo prisoners out of jail, the daily reminds its readers.

However, for the families of the victims the release is far from a trust builder. The paper writes that despite a press release by the Prime Minister’s Office Sunday night, in which it stated the families would be told who was being released before the media published the list, “because of time constraints… only [a few] families were updated that the terrorist who hurt their loved ones was being released.” Most of the families received no notification, and found out from the press.

Israel Hayom‘s headline addresses the sorrow of the bereaved families, but also features US Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to Israeli announcements of construction over the Green Line, which he called “an expected move.”

In a series of articles grouped under the title “the negotiations and their price,” the tabloid features an upcoming timetable for the talks between Israel and the PA. Talks between the parties will resume Wednesday and the 26 prisoners will be released late Tuesday night, it reports. The terrorists being released will be bused to crossings into Gaza and the West Bank under darkness, in an attempt to prevent mass celebrations and victory pictures.

“I tried to find something in the murderers’ favor. Not just for them, but also for me,” Dan Margalit writes in his column. If they were really freedom fighters, who killed “because of an ideal I could identify with” then it would be easier to come to terms with the injustice done to the victims’ families.

However, he states, the killers are “more like lepers. They’re like that, different from us, and it’s the truth even if it sounds condescending.” Margalit contrasts the acts of the terrorists being released with those of the Jews who actively fought against the British mandate and stresses the difference between targeting a military or government facility and blindly killing random people.

“It hurts us to release 104 terrorists, also because of the methods they chose to indifferently kill Jews, and also because it take a special personality to assassinate an elderly man sitting on a bench with a heavy object, and hit him time after time, again and again and again.”