Israel’s Shin Bet uncovers extensive Hamas terror network in Nablus
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) More than 40 Palestinians suspected of being Hamas operatives seeking to establish terrorist infrastructures in Judea and Samaria have been arrested over the past few months, Israel’s Shin Bet security agency revealed Wednesday.
The suspects were tasked with creating a wide terrorist network in Nablus and the surrounding villages, and with gathering intelligence to facilitate terrorist attacks across Judea and Samaria. The Shin Bet said the suspects’ interrogation suggested Hamas has been increasing its efforts to establish terror infrastructure in the area, including dividing Judea and Samaria into “sectors,” naming sector chiefs, and tasking them with promoting various Hamas activities in the area, including in the fields of education, economy, communications, propaganda, charity work, and providing financial aid to Palestinian prisoners’ families.
Sector chiefs were also tasked with promoting Hamas’s military interests in Judea and Samaria, including intelligence-gathering. According to the Shin Bet, the investigation also uncovered a Hamas terrorist cell operating in the Faraa refugee camp, near Jenin, whose members confessed to purchasing military-grade equipment such as night-vision goggles ahead of a planned terrorist attack.
“This investigation once again exposes the great efforts the Hamas leadership, on the ground and overseas, is willing to make to establish a solid, extensive, well-funded, and sustainable terrorist infrastructure in Samaria,” the Shin Bet said in a statement.
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Moshe Ya’alon: terror wave result of Palestinian incitement, Iranian funds
(JNS.org) The wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis over the past two weeks is the result of incitement that has increased during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said Wednesday.
Speaking at a conference hosted by the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center, Ya’alon said, “Unfortunately, the atmosphere during Ramadan is one where incitement is not directed solely against the State of Israel and Jews, but also against the West. In the Palestinian arena, this leads to stabbing and shooting attacks, and while we don’t know who was behind them at this point, it is very likely they were the work of [terrorist] groups.”
In recent months, with regards to “the dozens of terrorists, mainly from Hamas, arrested across Judea and Samaria before they were able to carry out attacks, I know from experience we eventually solve these cases,” said Ya’alon, Israel Hayom reported.
“We reach both the terrorists and those who sent them,” said the defense minister.
He added, “There’s Iranian funding. [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has declared that terrorists in Judea and Samaria must be funded and armed.”
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Netanyahu visits wounded Israeli victims of terrorism in hospital
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) At Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon visited two Israelis who were wounded in separate Palestinian terrorist attacks on Monday—one in a stabbing at Rachel’s Crossing south of Jerusalem and the other in a drive-by shooting near Shvut Rachel in Samaria.
“We just visited the wounded, who showed courage, level-headedness. and very great strength of spirit,” Netanyahu said. “The defense minister and I wished them a quick recovery.”
The prime minister vowed to “exact a heavy price from both the terrorists and those who send them.”
Meanwhile, the border policeman who was seriously wounded in a stabbing attack at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem on June 21 was released from Shaare Tzedek Medical Center on Wednesday.
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‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz’ during trial: ‘I can only ask my God for forgiveness’
(JNS.org) Former Nazi guard Oskar Groening, 94, asked for forgiveness on Wednesday upon testifying in his trial on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. Groening, dubbed the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” collected and tallied money from new prisoners arriving at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“There was self-denial in me that today I find impossible to explain,” Groening said, the German news agency DPA reported.
“Perhaps it was also the convenience of obedience with which we were brought up, which allowed no contradiction. This indoctrinated obedience prevented registering the daily atrocities as such and rebelling against them,” he said, adding, “I can only ask my God for forgiveness.”
Also during the trial on Wednesday, Auschwitz survivor Irene Weiss, 84, recounted how she arrived to the death camp at age 13 and was immediately separated from most of her family. “A woman pointed to a chimney and said: ‘Do you see the smoke? There is your family,'” she said.
Weiss said she considers Groening more than just a “small cog in the machine.”
“To that 13-year-old, any person who wore that uniform in that place, represented terror and the depths to which humanity can sink, regardless of what function they performed,” she said.
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Telecom giant Orange reaches deal that could spell split with Israeli subsidiary
(JNS.org) The French telecommunications giant Orange has reached a deal with its Israeli subsidiary that could spell a split between the two entities.
The deal comes in the wake of Orange CEO Stephane Richard’s comments last month that he wanted to cut business ties with Orange’s Israeli affiliate, Partner Communications, in response to pressure from anti-Israel activists in France and Egypt.
Richard later apologized for expressing the intent to end operations in Israel and said Orange would remain an investor in the Jewish state.
But in the latest twist, Orange said Tuesday that it has reached a deal with Partner that could end the two parties’ current agreement on providing cell phone service in Israel. According to the deal’s reported terms, Orange would pay Partner as much as $100 million if the agreement is ended within the next two years. An Orange spokesman has so far denied that the company is actually pulling out of Israel, and said Orange is simply rethinking its brand agreement with Partner, the Associated Press reported.
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Islamic State threatens to overthrow Hamas in Gaza
(JNS.org) Islamic State terrorists have released a video threatening to conquer the Gaza Strip and overthrow the rule of the Palestinian terror group Hamas in the coastal territory.
In a rare message issued from the Islamic State stronghold in Syria, addressed to the “tyrants of Hamas,” Islamic State said it “will uproot the state of the Jews (Israel) and you (Hamas) and Fatah, and all of the secularists are nothing and you will be overrun by our creeping multitudes.”
“The rule of [Islamic] Sharia [law] will be implemented in Gaza, in spite of you. We swear that what is happening in the Levant today, and in particular the Yarmouk camp, will happen in Gaza,” Islamic State added, in reference to its recent fighting in the Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus.
Hamas has been waging a widespread crackdown on Islamic State-inspired Salafi terror groups in Gaza over the past few months. Ironically, the pro-Islamic State Salafi groups consider Hamas, which fought a 50-day war against Israel last summer, as being too soft on Israel and for failing to impose stricter Islamic laws in Gaza.
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Netanyahu reaffirms Israel’s bond with Egypt after wave of Sinai terror attacks
(JNS.org) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed Israel’s joint commitment to fighting terrorism with Egypt following a wave of Islamic State-affiliated terror attacks in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
“We are partners with Egypt and with many other countries in the Middle East and in the world in the fight against extremist Islamist terror,” Netanyahu said during a visit with Israeli terror victims in Jerusalem.
“The terror is knocking at our doors. ISIS is not only on our border in the Golan, but it is also in Egypt, across from Rafah, directly at our border,” added Netanyahu.
According to reports, the Islamic State-affiliated “Sinai Province” terror group, which was formerly known as Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, has launched a wave of terrorist attacks in the northern Sinai that has killed at least 64 Egyptian army soldiers and civilians, Ahram Online reported. Egypt has responded by killing 90 terrorists through F-16 airstrikes and other military action, mainly around the city of Sheikh Zuweid.
As a result of the terror attacks, Israel has closed two border crossings with Egypt, Karem Shalom and Niztana, and will continue to monitor the situation.
Meanwhile, Egyptian security forces have arrested 20 people in connection with the assassination of the country’s top public prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, on Monday.
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2,000-year-old Jewish ritual bath discovered under Jerusalem home’s floor
(JNS.org) A 2,000-year-old Jewish ritual bath (mikvah) was discovered under a Jerusalem home’s living room floor during renovations of the structure, shedding light on both early Christianity and the Jewish communities of the Second Temple Period.
The bath, in accordance with Jewish laws of purity, was rock-hewn and meticulously plastered. It was 11.48 feet long, 7.87 feet wide, and 5.9 feet deep, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The mikvah contains a staircase leading to the bottom of the immersion pool, with pottery vessels dating to the Second Temple Period and traces of fire that might suggest evidence of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans from 66-70 CE.
The house’s owners, who were initially hesitant to involve the IAA over fear of consequences to their home, were awarded with an IAA certificate of appreciation.
“Such instances of finding antiquities beneath a private home can happen only in Israel and Jerusalem in particular,” said Amit Re’em, IAA’s Jerusalem District archaeologist.
While the discovery of the mikvah is significant in its own right, it also sheds light on early Christianity during the Second Temple Period.
“Ein Kerem is considered a place sacred to Christianity in light of its identification with ‘a city of Judah’—the place where according to the New Testament, John the Baptist was born and where his pregnant mother Elisabeth met with Mary, mother of Jesus,” said Re’em.
The archaeologist added, “The discovery of the ritual bath reinforces the hypothesis there was a Jewish settlement from the time of the Second Temple located in the region of what is today ‘Ein Kerem.’”
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Holocaust rescuer Nicholas Winton, known as ‘British Schindler,’ dies at 106
(JNS.org) Nicholas Winton, who rescued 669 children during the Holocaust and was dubbed the “British Schindler” (after German Holocaust rescuer Oskar Schindler), has died at the age of 106.
According to his son-in-law Stephen Watson, Winton died peacefully in his sleep at Wexham Hospital in the U.K, the BBC reported. His death coincided with the anniversary of the departure of a train carrying his largest group of rescued children, 241, from Czechoslovakia. During the Holocaust, such rescue-by-train missions were part of a system known as the “Kindertransport.”
For nine months beginning in December 1938, Winton worked in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to save hundreds of children, mainly from Jewish families, from near-certain death. Winton used a new British law that allowed children under 17 to obtain refugee status if they had a deposit placed for their eventual return. His story was hidden from the public for nearly 50 years. Today, more than 370 of the children he saved have never been traced.
But by the time he died, Winton had obtained international fame for his efforts during World War II, including knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 2003.
“I called myself Honorary Secretary of the Children’s Section of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia,” Winton told the Washington Post in 1989.
“The other people, they just called me a bloody nuisance,” he added, referring to government bureaucracies and other entities.
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