Report: Jewish couple attacked in NYC by pro-Palestinians
(JNS.org) A Jewish couple was attacked Monday in an apparent anti-Semitic incident on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
According to the New York Post, two cars and a motorcycle pulled up to the Jewish couple on East 63rd Street near Third Avenue around 8 p.m. and began shouting anti-Jewish statements. The attackers then threw a water bottle at the wife and punched the 27-year-old husband in the face when he moved to defend her, a police source said.
Police sources said that the assailants then took off from the scene in their vehicles, some of which bore Palestinian flags.
The New York Police Department’s hate crimes unit is investigating the incident since it believes the victim was targeted because he was wearing a yarmulke.
*
Parents of missing American yeshiva student offer $28,000 reward for safe return
(JNS.org) The parents of missing 23-year-old American yeshiva student Aaron Sofer are offering a $28,000 reward for anyone who can help locate their missing son.
Sofer has been missing since Friday, when he and a friend went on a hike in a difficult rocky and wooded portion of the Jerusalem Forest. At some point during the hike, Sofer and his friend apparently became separated, with Sofer never emerging.
“The police are working tirelessly on all fronts, and all options are being strongly investigated,”Sofer’s father Moshe said, the Jerusalem Post reported. “We would like to thank the American Consulate, the office of the Consul General, the FBI and the Israeli Police and ZAKA for all their efforts in trying to find our dear son Aaron.”
Meanwhile, nightly prayer vigils have been held in Sofer’s hometown in Lakewood, New Jersey. Many family members and friends are deeply worried about Sofer in light of Hamas’s kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens—Naftali Frankel, 16, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19—in June.
“It’s scary to think what possibly could be the ramifications,”Sofer family neighbor Tzvi Meth told New York’s CBS 2. “Great fear is that he was accosted; he was taken away, kidnapped.”
*
Israeli man dies of wounds from mortar fire near Gaza border
(JNS.org) An Israeli man died of wounds he sustained from a mortar attack on the Eshkol Regional Council near the Gaza border.
According to Magen David Adom (MDA) emergency medical services, four people were injured in the mortar attack. Earlier on Tuesday, another rocket slammed into a residential neighborhood in Ashkelon, where 40 people were treated for light wounds and shock, MDA said.
Another rocket salvo launched Tuesday afternoon caused shrapnel to fall in the courtyard of a kindergarten in Ashdod.
*
Shin Bet: Hamas leaders hiding in bunkers under Gaza hospital
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Ismail Haniyeh and other top Hamas leaders are hiding in bunkers located under Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, a Hamas operative revealed when interrogated by Israel’s Shin Bet security agency.
The information was provided by Mohammed Kadra, 28, from Khan Younis, a Hamas operative arrested during Operation Protective Edge. Kadra claimed that the location of the Hamas leadership’s hideout was “common knowledge”among Gazans, but that the public was barred from the area.
“During interrogations of Hamas operatives arrested during the Gaza operation, it has become disconcertingly clear that Hamas is using public buildings as bases of operations and that it is using civilians for cover, as it assumes Israel would refrain from targeting such places,” a Shin Bet report said.
Two prisoners—identified as Afif Jarah and Amad Jarah, from the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia—revealed the location of a terror tunnel dug under the Israel-Gaza border. They said the tunnel led directly to a kindergarten in one of the communities adjacent to the border fence.
*
2 rockets hit northern Israel, apparently fired from Lebanon
(JNS.org) Two rockets which appeared to be fired from Lebanon on Monday night hit near a moshav in northern Israel, effectively opening up a second front in the current conflict. There there were no injuries or property damage.
At approximately 10:15 p.m., sirens blared across the Upper Galilee region and Hula Valley. After a few seconds, two large explosions were heard in the area, Israel Hayom reported.
According to the Israel Defense Forces, the explosions were the result of two rocket launches from Lebanon, but because the location of the impact was yet undetermined it was still not clear what type of rockets were fired.
The IDF responded with artillery fire at the source of the rocket launches, and Israel issued a harsh complaint to the UNIFIL peacekeeping forces based in southern Lebanon. Monday night’s rocket salvo was the second such attack against Israel in the past 48 hours, coming on the heels of two shooting incidents on the Israel-Syria border in the Golan Heights.
*
New York judge joins U.N. Gaza probe
(JNS.org) Former New York Supreme Court Justice Mary McGowan Davis was appointed as the third member of the contentious United Nations Human Rights Council’s Gaza war crimes investigation.
McGowan Davis joins William Schabas and Doudou Diene on the three-person panel that is tasked with investigating violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in the latest Israel-Hamas conflict. She has previously served on a U.N. committee of independent experts tasked with investigating the implementations of the 2009 Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of war crimes in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the Jerusalem Post reported.
The Israeli government has been highly critical of the new U.N. probe, calling it a “kangaroo court.”Its chairman, Canadian professor of international law Schabas, has made harsh anti-Israel statements in the past, including calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former president Shimon Peres to be indicted before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
*
Gazans increasingly fighting for Islamic State
(JNS.org) Despite the conflict raging between Israel and the Palestinian terror group Hamas in Gaza, several Palestinian terrorists from Gaza have been fighting for the Islamic State jihadist group in Iraq and Syria.
According to Vocativ, several Palestinians from Rafah, Nuseirat, and Jabalia in Gaza have died fighting for the Islamic State.
Citing Islamic State forums and social media accounts, Vocativ said two of the Gazans who were recently killed were from the Sinai-based al-Qaeda-affiliated terror groups Ansar Beit al-Maqdis and Ansar al-Dawla al-Islamia.
Ansar al-Dawla posted on its Twitter page a short eulogy for one of the terrorits, Muhammad Naif al-Qarinawi, who was killed July in battle near Homs, Syria.
Vocativ listed several other Gazan Palestinians who have died fighting for the Islamic State. Wissam el-Attal, a 37-year-old dentist from Jabalia in Gaza, apparently carried out a suicide bombing in Aleppo and uploaded a video to YouTube to say goodbye to his family before he left.
Additionally, reports indicate that several radical Salafist groups in Gaza have pledged support for the Islamic State. Some of these groups have claimed to fire rockets on Israel from Gaza.
*
Time magazine retracts claim of IDF harvesting Palestinian organs
(JNS.org) Time magazine retracted an unsubstantiated claim made in a video that the IDF harvests organs of killed Palestinians.
In the video, which appeared inside a Time piece published online Aug. 23, the narrator stated that the “IDF is not without controversy”because “in 2009 a Swedish report came out exposing some Israeli troops of selling organs of Palestinians who died in their custody.”
According to the media watchdog Honest Reporting, the Swedish report was published in the tabloid magazine Aftonbladet by reporter Donald Boström, who after being accused of anti-Semitism later said “whether it’s true or not—I have no idea, I have no clue.”
In addition, one Palestinian woman whose family was cited in the report later denied telling any foreign journalist that her son’s organs were stolen, according to the Jerusalem Post.
Time later updated the video by removing the claim on organs and adding a correction stating, “The original version of this video cited a contested allegation in a 2009 Swedish newspaper as fact. The allegation has been removed from the video.”
*
Jewish group: Europe ‘ripe’for Islamic State terrorist attack
(JNS.org) The European Jewish Congress warned that parts of Europe are “already ripe for a terrorist attack”by the Islamic State terror group.
“Over the last few weeks we have witnessed tens of thousands of radical Islamists on the streets of Europe calling for jihad, the slaughter of Jews, and the imposition of Sharia law,”European Jewish Congress head Dr. Moshe Kantor said in a statement Monday.
Kantor said it is “clear that terrorist groups like Islamic State, whose flag has been waved openly across Europe, are watching the impunity of these violent demonstrations and taking note.”
The fatal shooting at the Brussels Jewish museum in April could become “the first of many attacks”if Europeans do not stand up to the rise of radical Islam in their countries, added Kantor.
*
Articles from JNS.org are carried on San Diego Jewish World thank to the generosity of Dr. Bob and Mao Shillman