IDF training complex will make Negev ‘Israeli Silicon Valley,’ Netanyahu says
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) The Israel Defense Forces’ massive training complex in the Negev will cost Israel 21 billion shekels ($5.92 billion) to complete, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon both said during a tour of the site on Wednesday.
According to the current timetable, the IDF’s Communication Corps compound will be transferred from central Israel to the new Negev complex next year. The IDF’s intelligence compound is set to move to the Negev in 2018, and with it 30,000 personnel of which 6,000 are career servicemen.
“The IDF’s move to the Negev represents an unprecedented maneuver in its scope and economic, social and cultural impact. The completion of the maneuver will see the Negev turn into the ‘Israeli Silicon Valley,’” Netanyahu said.
In July, the Israeli cabinet approved a government investment of 500 million shekels ($137 million) to Negev communities.
The money will be invested in the Negev over the next five years to develop educational institutions as well as industrial and high-tech parks that will facilitate job opportunities for spouses of career IDF servicemen and women. Local residents will benefit from a development and construction boom the likes of which has not seen in the south in years.
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U.S. ‘red light’ on Iran nuclear program strike by Israel turns ‘yellow,’ Yadlin says
(JNS.org) Amos Yadlin, former head of military intelligence for the Israel Defense Forces, said America might be warming up to the prospect of an Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear program.
“In 2012 the [U.S.] red light [regarding an Israeli strike] was as red as it can get, the brightest red,” Yadlin told Army Radio on Wednesday in an interview cited by the Times of Israel. “But the music I’m hearing lately from Washington says, ‘If this is truly an overriding Israeli security interest, and you think you want to strike,’ then the light hasn’t changed to green, I think, but it’s definitely yellow.”
Yadlin, who is currently the director of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, had said in April that by this summer, Iran would be “a month or two away from deciding about a bomb.”
Latest Syrian civil war patient in Israeli hospital walks a day after major surgery
(JNS.org) A 15-year-old Syrian girl who lost one leg during clashes in the Syrian civil war, and was seriously injured from shrapnel in her other leg and her abdomen, walked just one day after undergoing major surgery at Ziv hospital in Safed, Israel.
On Tuesday, the Syrian girl was able to stand for the first time on her salvaged leg, and she walked with the aid of crutches. The girl’s smile “thrilled the entire staff” at Ziv, said the director of the hospital’s orthopedic department, Dr. Alexander Lerner, according to Israel Hayom and Reuters.
The teenager is not the first Syrian civil war patient to be treated in Israeli hospitals, and not the only child. At Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya, Israelis recently treated a 3-year-old, 9-year-old, and 12-year-old wounded in the war, reported the New York Times. Since March, nearly 100 Syrians arrived for treatment at two hospitals in Israel’s Galilee region.
“They wake up after a few days or whenever and hear a strange language and see strange people,” said the general director of the Western Galilee Hospital, Dr. Masad Barhoum. “If they can talk, the first question is, ‘Where am I?’”
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Middle East Donald Duck ‘quaks’ for Israel to be ‘demolished’ on Twitter
(JNS.org) The man behind the Arabic voice of the Middle East version of Donald Duck called for Israel to be “demolished.”
“I truly wish #Israel is demolished, I hate Zionism, I have so much hate inside me with every single child they murder or land they seize!” Mansour posted on Twitter.
“I don’t know why insulting #Israel & #Zionism is ‘Anti-Semitic’?! They are just a bunch of Polish/Ethiopian immigrants roughly 70 years old,” he also posted.
When reached directly by The Algemeiner, Mansour added that the “Zionist entity is a racist entity by definition.”
“[Zionism is] performing crimes of hate by the power of its criminal law. I stand firm by what I said,” Mansour said.
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End Hamas support, 24 U.S. Reps. tell Qatar
(JNS.org) A bipartisan letter urging Qatar to end its support for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, sent Aug. 2 to Qatari Ambassador to the U.S. Mohamed Bin Abdulla Al-Rumaihi, garnered 24 signatures from members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Qatar reportedly pledged more than $400 million to Hamas in October 2012 during a visit to Gaza by Qatar’s ruling emir at the time, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. The U.S. House letter, organized by U.S. Reps. Peter Roskam (R-IL) and John Barrow (D-GA), had been circulating in the House since last month.
“We must continue to put pressure on any country that funds Hamas. Qatar is an ally of the United States, so it is our responsibility to question Qatar’s apparent growing ties to a widely recognized terrorist organization,” Roskam told JNS.org.
Hamas has found itself in an increasingly precarious position amid the upheaval in the Middle East. For years, Hamas relied on support from Shi’a powers—Iran, Syria and Hezbollah—to back its terror operations. But Hamas has refused to support President Bashar al-Assad’s government in its fight against rebels in the Syrian civil war, and closed its office in Damascus. As a result, Hamas has sought to align with Sunni powers such as Turkey, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
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Al-Qaeda flag raised over Egyptian Coptic church
(JNS.org) Hundreds of supporters of Mohamed Morsi, the ousted Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, gathered in front of St. George Church in the Upper Egyptian city of Sohag last weekend and raised the black flag of Al-Qaeda over the church.
According to Coptic Solidarity, a U.S.-based Coptic human rights organization that cited a local Egyptian report in Shorouk News, the Islamists chanted that Egypt should be an “Islamic [state] despite [the wishes of] secularists.” The church immediately closed its doors after the demonstration and prevented the entry or exit of its members.
Additionally, hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters surrounded a church in the Egyptian city of Girga to denounce Coptic Christian Pope Tawadros and his support for the interim military-backed government.
The head of Al-Qaeda, Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a recent recorded message accused the U.S. of plotting with Egypt Coptic Christians, the country’s military, and secularists to overthrow Morsi.
“Crusaders and secularists and the Americanised army have converged… with Gulf money and American plotting to topple Mohamed Morsi’s government,” al-Zawahiri said, according to a translation by Sky News.
Al-Zawahiri also said that Egypt Coptic Christians were plotting to overthrow Morsi to obtain “a Coptic state stripped from Egypt’s south.”
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Preceding provided by JNS.org