Jordan: IDF helped us destroy Israeli spy devices from 1969
(JNS.org) Jordan’s military chief revealed Tuesday that what was previously identified as an archaeological dig near Aljoun University in northern Jordan was in fact a joint Jordanian military and Israel Defense Forces intelligence operation to remove Israeli listening devices placed there in 1969.
In a press conference at Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour’s home, the country’s military chief, Gen. Mashal al-Zaben, said the listening devices had been connected to Jordanian communication lines. Explosives had been planted next to the devices in case they were discovered.
“After an explosion which took place February 2013 on the Al-Khalidiya highway, the Jordanian military began to investigate the cause of the blast,” the general said, according to Israel Hayom.
“Jordanian special forces searched throughout Jordan, and we found that there are five sites with listening devices in them. Because they are located in populated areas, we turned to the Israelis for information on them. … Over the past year and half we have neutralized and destroyed most of the sites ourselves using controlled explosions,” said al-Zaben.
According to the general, the last spy device was destroyed by Israelis under Jordanian military supervision out of concern that damage would be done to the nearby university compounds.
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Sara Netanyahu honored by Jewish leaders
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Sara Netanyahu, wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was honored by Jewish federation leaders on Tuesday in New York for her work with wounded soldiers and bereaved families during Operation Protective Edge.
The prime minister’s wife was active in reaching out to the families who paid the heaviest price of the fighting in the Gaza war. In July, she visited the Shaul family—which made the difficult decision to mourn their son Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul, who was declared dead after an attack on an armored personnel carrier in Shujaiyya, but whose body was never recovered. She also visited Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, where two nurses had sons who were wounded in Gaza.
The Netanyahus also kept in close contact with the families of the three Jewish teens who were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in June.
“I sat behind you at the funeral of the three boys,” Malcom Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told Sara Netanyahu on Tuesday. “I had just landed and came directly to the cemetery. I saw how you spoke to those three mothers. I was crying before, I cried a lot more afterwards. The comfort you gave them, the way you related to them… it said more than all the tributes and all the things I could say.”
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Iraq’s Assyrian Christians form militia to fight Islamic State
(JNS.org) Iraqi Assyrian Christians have formed the country’s first Christian militia to defend their ancient villages and to fight the Islamic State terror group.
The militia, which calls itself Dwekh Nawsha—an Assyrian phrase meaning self-sacrifice—was formed in August following the rapid advance of Islamic State jihadists on their ancient homeland in northern Iraq’s Nineveh Plains.
“We are small in size but big in faith,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Odisho, the former Iraqi army officer in charge of the militia’s new recruits, AFP reported.
According to the Assyrian International News Agency, it is estimated that up to 200,000 Christians and other minorities such as the Yazidis fled their villages in northern Iraq after the assault by Islamic State during the summer.
The decision to form the militia came after many Assyrians blamed the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters for abandoning Assyrian towns as Islamic State jihadists launched their swift assault last summer.
“The Kurds did not protect us, the Iraqi government did not protect us,” a Christian fighter told AFP.
On Dwekh Nawsha’s Facebook page, the Christian militia has posted several pictures and videos of armed fighters wearing military fatigues similar to that of the Kurdish Peshmerga, but instead emblazoned with the Assyrian flag arm patch. Other videos on the group’s YouTube page show the Christian fighters on military exercises in and around villages in northern Iraq.
It is estimated that the Christian militia has about 2,000 volunteers, according to the Assyrian Democratic Movement, Iraq’s top Christian political party. These Christians will likely fight alongside the Peshmerga, which has been buoyed by military and financial support from the West in its fight against Islamic State.
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Police suspect Israeli worker who fell from building was murdered by Arab
(JNS.org) Israeli police suspect that Netanel Arami—the 27-year-old construction worker who was recently killed when he fell from the 11th floor of a Petah Tikva construction site—was murdered by an Arab co-worker who cut the rope holding Arami while he was rappelling on the side of the building, Israel National News reported Tuesday.
The police’s reported assessment of the case falls in line with prior statements by Arami family members and Israeli politicians. Member of Knesset Moshe Feiglin (Likud) has said, “[Police] went up to the roof and found the slashed rope, heard the Arabs laughing. A rappelling rope that has been cut looks completely different from one that was worn out. And there are two of them—one main rope and one for security.”
Although the investigation of the incident is ongoing, Arami’s wife Moriya said Sunday that her husband was adept at rappelling, making an accident less likely. Netanel “was a religious man, but he always went to work without a kippah on his head out of fear of the Palestinian workers employed at construction sites,” she said, according to Israel National News.
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Editor of medical journal that published anti-Israel letter visits Haifa hospital
(JNS.org) The Rambam Health Care Campus (RHCC) in the northern Israeli city of Haifa is hosting a series of meetings this week with Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, which came under fire this summer for publishing an open letter signed by 24 doctors and scientists who accused Israel of a “massacre” as well as a “ruthless assault of unlimited duration, extent, and intensity” in Gaza.
The Israeli hospital said it invited Horton in order to showcase the diversity of the facility’s staff and patients as well as the medical cooperation regularly taking place between RHCC and the Palestinian Authority in order to treat patients in Gaza and the West Bank. In addition to treating Gazan patients and training Palestinian physicians, the hospital is receiving wounded Syrian refugees. Recently, RHCC doctors conducted a successful kidney transplant on a 14-year-old boy from Gaza.
RHCC is proving that medicine has “no borders,” Prof. Rafi Beyar, the director of RHCC,recently told JNS.org. Many of the hospital’s Gazan patients are children facing cancer and kidney diseases. “These kids don’t have any other solutions,” Beyar said.
In a statement on Horton’s visit, Beyar said Tuesday that the Lancet editor “will be quite impressed and will learn that Israel’s public health system does its very best to genuinely care for its neighbors, that multiculturalism and medical education is extended to health care professionals in the Palestinian Authority, and he will observe Rambam’s exceptional openness and scientific representatives, on behalf of the state of Israel for the development of global research and medicine.”
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U.S. resumes transfer of Hellfire missiles to Israel after summer holdup
(JNS.org) The United States has resumed the transfer of Hellfire precision surface-to-air missiles to Israel following a summertime controversy over America’s implementation of increased oversight of arms transfers to the Jewish state.
The Times of Israel reported that the U.S. has already supplied some of the missiles Israel had previously requested over the summer, and that the additional shipments are on the way. Supplies of ammunition used by Israeli tanks, which were also affected by the new review process, have also resumed.
An August report in The Wall Street Journal said that the White House had tightened control on arms transfers to Israel amid the summer war against Hamas, leading to a significant strain in relations between the close allies. According to that report, the U.S. decision may have been spurred by the discovery that the Israel Defense Forces had secured American munitions transfers by way of military channels, without the express approval of the White House.
“I don’t think we know the facts about this incident, but it occurs against a background of considerable tension between the Obama administration and the government of Israel,” Elliott Abrams, who served as a top national security adviser to President George W. Bush, told JNS.org at the time.
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Pope Francis summons Mideast envoys to Vatican amid Islamic State threat
(JNS.org) Pope Francis has summoned the envoys of several Middle East countries to the Vatican for a rare meeting, likely to discuss a response to the ongoing threats in the region.
The Vatican said Tuesday that envoys from Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, as well as representatives from the European Union and United Nations, will gather in Rome from Oct. 2 -4.
During his address to the U.N. General Assembly on Monday, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, told international leaders that world is “seeing a totally new phenomenon—the existence of a terrorist organization which threatens all states,” and that it is “both licit and urgent to stop aggression through multilateral action and a proportionate use of force.”
“Here with you today, I cannot fail to mention the many Christians and ethnic minorities who in recent months have endured atrocious persecution and suffering in Iraq and Syria. Their blood demands of us all an unwavering commitment to respect and promote the dignity of every single person as willed and created by God,” Parolin said.
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