Five killed as explosion topples building in northern Israeli city of Acre
(JNS.org) Five people were killed, including an 8-year-old boy, and 12 others were wounded in the early hours of Monday morning when an explosion caused a three-story residential building in the northern Israeli city of Acre to collapse, Israel Hayom reported.
While it was initially believed that a gas explosion had toppled the building, the police are currently exploring the possibility that the blast was triggered by a small explosive device, planted on the building’s roof as part of an ongoing dispute between neighbors.
Once first responders including police, Magen David Adom (MDA) paramedics, and Fire and Rescue Services teams arrived at the scene and discovered the building had collapsed, MDA declared the incident a mass casualty event. The victims were identified as Mohammed Badr (43) and his wife Hanan (38), Rayeq Sarhan (55) and his wife Najah (51), and the latter couple’s son Nasreddin (8).
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JNF plans to invest $285 million in Negev, Galilee
(JNS.org) Speaking on a media tour of the Negev and the Arava, Jewish National Fund (JNF) Chairman Efi Stenzler said Sunday that the organization plans to invest more than NIS 1 billion ($285 million) in the development of the Negev and the Galilee regions in the coming years, with the aim of creating a higher quality of life in both regions.
“The JNF has made a strategic decision to reduce the gaps between the periphery and central Israel, the Negev and the Galilee,” Stenzler said, according to Israel Hayom.
“We’re tenaciously pursuing the new Zionism, meaning settling the Negev, through vast and unprecedented investments in the area. The JNF, as a green Zionist organization, has chosen the geographic and social periphery as Israel’s future growth district,” he added.
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Google purchases fifth Israeli company, SlickLogin
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Google has purchased its fifth Israeli company, the Tel Aviv-based start-up SlickLogin, whose technology verifies and authenticates user identity (when logging onto a website) by using an audio signal sent through a smartphone app.
SlickLogin founders Or Zelig, Eran Galili, and Ori Kabeli began developing their program in August 2013. In September, they presented it at San Francisco’s technology start-up conference TechCrunch Disrupt, and in December registered as an official company.
The three-man company—which has not yet registered a patent or recruited investors, and has no customers—joined Google’s global team operating out of Tel Aviv.
SlickLogin said Google “shares our core beliefs that logging in should be easy instead of frustrating, and authentication should be effective without getting in the way.”
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Four killed in bombing of tourist bus at Israel-Egypt border crossing
(JNS.org) At least five people were killed and 14 were injured in an explosion on a tour bus at the Taba border crossing between Israel and Egypt on Sunday.
Four Korean tourists and their Egyptian driver were killed on a bus that arrived in Taba after touring the St. Catherine’s Greek Orthodox monastery in the central Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian Interior Ministry said. According to Arabic-language media reports, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis—an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group that recently fired rockets at Eilat—claimed responsibility for the bus attack.
(From San Diego Jewish World–The U.S. State Department on Monday, Feb. 17, issued a statement about the attack: “We extend our deepest condolences to the families of the Republic of Korea citizens killed and injured in yesterday’s terror attack in Egypt. We condemn this cowardly attack on innocent tourists. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their loved ones.”)
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Hamas: UN agency’s proposed textbooks for Gaza too ‘peaceful’
(JNS.org) Hamas has blocked the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East from introducing new textbooks for 7th-9th grade students in Gaza because they do not match the Palestinian terrorist group’s violence-driven ideology.
“There is a tremendous focus [in the textbooks] on the peaceful resistance as the only tool to achieve freedom and independence,” said Motesem al-Minawi, a spokesman for the education ministry in Hamas-governed Gaza, the Associated Press reported. Hamas says it prefers “armed resistance” against Israel.
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Netanyahu and Obama expected to extend Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations
(JNS.org) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama are expected to agree on a one-year extension of the current American-brokered Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations at their White House meeting in early March, Deputy Minister Ofir Akunis (Likud) said at a cultural event in Ramat Gan on Saturday.
“There is no confrontation with the U.S., but there are certainly some fundamental differences of opinion” relating to the negotiations, Akunis said, according to Israel Hayom.
“An Israeli withdrawal to the June 4, 1967, borders (rumored to be the basis of Secretary of State John Kerry’s forthcoming framework agreement proposal) would be like a suicidal person jumping off the roof of the Azrieli Towers (a trio of Tel Aviv skyscrapers),” Akunis said.
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Conference of Presidents receives key to the city of Toledo, Spain
(JNS.org) The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations on Friday received the key to the city of Toledo, Spain, from its mayor, Emiliano García-Page.
“No people deserves this key more than the Jewish people,” García-Page said.
A day earlier, the 60 American Jewish leaders traveling to Spain with the Conference of Presidents met with Spanish King Juan Carlos I at Zarzuela Palace in Madrid.
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Israel summons Hungarian ambassador over growing anti-Semitism
(JNS.org) The Israeli Foreign Ministry summoned Hungary’s newly appointed ambassador to the Jewish state, Andor Nagy, to express “deep concern” over rising anti-Semitism in his country.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Rafi Schutz, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s director-general for Europe, expressed concern to Nagy about recent anti-Semitic statements by government officials and a growing trend to rewrite history concerning Hungary’s role in the Holocaust and its anti-Semitic WWII leader Miklos Horthy.
Last November, despite protests from Jewish leaders, a statue of Horthy was erected by members of the far-right Jobbik party in Budapest. Horthy, a close ally of Hitler, played a direct role in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.
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Israeli start-up Viber purchased for $900 million by electronics giant Rakuten
(JNS.org) The Israeli-founded voice and video communications app Viber has been purchased for $900 million by the Japanese electronics giant Rakuten, Bloomberg News reported.
Hiroshi Mikitani, the Japanese billionaire who controls Rakuten, said Viber will help provide a distribution channel for his company’s digital products. Viber has more than 300 million users of its instant messaging and free Internet phone services.
“Viber understands how people actually want to engage and have built the only service that truly delivers on all fronts,” Mikitani said. “This makes Viber the ideal total consumer engagement platform for Rakuten.”
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Israel’s Rafael unveils Iron Beam, ‘Star Wars’-like missile defense system
(JNS.org) Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems unveiled its latest missile defense system, called Iron Beam, which uses lasers to destroy incoming rockets and mortars.
“It’s exactly like what you see in ‘Star Wars,’” Rafael spokesman Amit Zimmer said at the Singapore Airshow, the Associated Press reported. “You see the lasers go up so quickly like a flash and the target is finished.”
According to Rafael, the Iron Beam system is designed to intercept super close-range drones, rockets, and mortars that aren’t in the air long enough for Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system to pick up.
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72% of Israelis want public, not MKs, to elect president
(JNS.org) With Israel’s upcoming presidential election poised to have the highest-ever number of candidates, a survey conducted for Israel Hayom by the New Wave Research Institute found that 72 percent of Jewish Israelis favor holding a direct public vote for president over the current election system.
Just 20 percent of respondents said they would prefer to retain the current system, in which Members of Knesset elect the president. Asked whether Israel should abolish the office of the president—a mostly ceremonial role—63.8 percent said no and 26.5 percent said yes.
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Preceding provided by JNS.org. (Sponsorship for JNS stories on San Diego Jewish World is available. Interested parties may contact editor Donald H. Harrison at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com)