Pope Francis, Peres, Abbas pray for peace in Vatican City
(JNS.org) Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas joined Pope Francis to pray for peace in Vatican City on Sunday.
“Peacemaking calls for courage, much more so than warfare,” Pope Francis said. “It calls for the courage to say yes to encounter and no to conflict.”
The 90-year-old Peres said, “I was young. Now I am old. I experienced war. I tasted peace. … And all my life I shall never stop to act for peace, for generations to come. Let’s all of us join hands and make it happen.”
“O Lord, bring comprehensive and just peace to our country and region so that our people and the peoples of the Middle East and the whole world would enjoy the fruit of peace, stability, and coexistence,” said Abbas, whose Fatah party recently formed a unity government with the terrorist group Hamas.
Peres and Abbas also met privately for about 15 minutes.
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Gaza rocket explodes in Ashkelon region
(JNS.org) A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip exploded in the Ashkelon region of southern Israel on Sunday night, Israel Hayom reported.
No injuries or damage were reported. Warning sirens sounded in the area before the rocket exploded. Early last week, the Israeli Air Force struck two terror targets in Gaza in response to rocket fire from the Hamas-controlled coastal enclave.
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Netanyahu adviser: Israel must be ready to act alone against Iran
(JNS.org) Israel must be prepared to act alone in the face of the Iranian nuclear threat, Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former head of the Israeli National Security Council, said Sunday at the annual Herzliya Conference.
“While the U.S. is an irreplaceable strategic ally, we need to be ready to do things on our own,” Amidror said, according to Israel Hayom.
In response, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro said the U.S. “will use military force if necessary.”
“Not every problem results in military action,” he said.
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IDF opens combat positions to cancer survivors
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Israel Defense Forces (IDF) recruits with medical histories of certain serious diseases, including some types of cancer, will now be allowed to volunteer for combat positions, the IDF has decided.
The combat positions include elite units in the artillery, armored, and combat engineering forces, but not in elite infantry units.
The IDF Medical Corps has recently been pushing to draft young Israelis who in the past would have been prevented from serving because of their medical histories. The campaign includes a decision not to exclude potential soldiers for being underweight.
Draftees with hypothyroidism or whose thyroid was removed because of cancer, while still assigned a low medical rating, will now be eligible for a greater variety of service roles, such as combat service with the Israeli Border Police and positions in the IDF Homefront Command.
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Israeli ministers advance bill to curb release of terrorist prisoners
(JNS.org) A bill that would make it more difficult for Israeli presidents to pardon terrorists inched closer to passage on Sunday as government ministers voted to submit the bill for a Knesset plenum vote, Israel Hayom reported.
Under the proposed bill, judges in criminal cases who sentence defendants to life in prison following a murder conviction would be allowed to add a special clause that would prohibit the president from pardoning them or commuting the sentence.
The bill, officially titled “Basic Law: The President (Amendment—Prohibition on Release of Murderers),” does not apply to prisoners who are already serving their sentence.
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Hillary Clinton rewrites her position on Israeli construction
(JNS.org) In a section of Hillary Clinton’s new memoir that was published by U.S. media over the weekend, the former secretary of state writes that the Obama administration made a tactical mistake by demanding an Israeli construction freeze that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implemented between 2009 and 2010.
Clinton in Hard Choices writes, “In retrospect, our early, hard line on settlements didn’t work.” She explains that the American stance on the settlements hardened Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s position.
Yet the sentiment Clinton expresses in the book contrasts sharply with her stated views on Israeli construction while she served as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. In May 2009, she told Al Jazeera, “We want to see a stop to settlement construction, additions, natural growth—any kind of settlement activity. That is what the president has called for.” Later that month, at a press conference with Egypt’s foreign minister, Clinton said Obama “wants to see a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions.”
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Happiness comes cheap in Israel, new study finds
(JNS.org) It costs less to be happy in Israel than anywhere else in the world, according to new rankings from the Bloomberg news agency.
The Bloomberg scale is based on statistics about living standards published by the World Bank for 2010-2012, the per capita gross domestic product for each nation, and each country’s score on the Gallup happiness survey. The “price” of happiness in Israel stood at $4,491 per capita.
Happiness costs approximately $4,700 per person in Finland and Denmark, $5,119 in France, and $7,051 in the United States, according to the Bloomberg scale, which measured 23 nations.The highest happiness price was measured in Qatar, at $14,609 per capita.
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Israeli and Egyptian Christian leaders congratulate El-Sisi on presidential victory
(JNS.org) Israeli leaders as well as leaders of Egypt’s Christian community congratulated Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on winning the Egyptian presidential election.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres both spoke with El-Sisi on Friday. “Prime Minister Netanyahu noted to the Egyptian president-elect the strategic importance of ties between the countries and sustaining the peace accords between them,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.
Pope Tawadros II, who heads Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church, described El-Sisi’s win as “the fruit of the people’s trust and indication of clear popular will,” Al-Ahram reported.
“El-Sisi is the right man at the right time. His victory gives us Christians security and a perspective for the future. Better times are coming,” said Bishop Adel Zaky, who heads the Catholic Church in Egypt.
El-Sisi became a hero in Egypt for his role in the July 2013 ouster of Islamist president and Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi. Israel and Egypt have a shared interest in cracking down on Islamic terror groups in the Sinai Peninsula and in targeting the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
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