Palestinian driver admits to car-ramming attack in Judea and Samaria
(JNS.org) A 22-year-old Palestinian man confessed to intentionally driving into a bus stop outside the Jewish community of Alon Shvut in Judea and Samaria on Thursday. The Shin Bet security agency said that Muhammed Arfaaya of Hebron, who injured four Israelis ages 16-25 in the terrorist attack, admitted to having nationalistic motives.
The four wounded Israelis, all students at yeshivas and high schools in Gush Etzion, were on their way home for the weekend when Arfaaya’s car veered off the highway and ran them down as they were trying to catch a lift at the same hitchhiking spot where three Jewish teens were abducted (and later murdered) by Hamas terrorists last June.
“[My friend] Ari and I were standing at the stop facing Beit Shemesh because we needed to get home,” said 25-year-old Binyamin Frenkel, who was lightly wounded in Thursday’s attack, Israel Hayomreported. “Out of the corner of his eye, Ari saw the car coming closer, grabbed me and shouted, ‘Get out of the way!’ We moved, but the car had already hit us.”
“Ari was on the ground, 6 or 7 meters (about 20 feet) away,” Frenkel said. “Army doctors and ambulances came and got us. At Hadassah [Medical Center in Jerusalem], I realized he was still alive.”
Arfaaya, who was released from prison about a year ago after serving a sentence for throwing rocks and carrying a knife, told interrogators that he wanted to hurt Jews in the vehicular attack. In November 2014, a combined car-ramming/stabbing attack at the hitchhiking post on the other side of the same highway killed Jewish woman Dalia Lemkus.
On Wednesday, the Shin Bet named Israeli Arab man Majdi Mahmed Salah, 31, as the suspect in a car-ramming terror attack on April 25 in the A-Tur neighborhood of Jerusalem. Three Israeli police officers were wounded in that attack. Also in April, an Arab man drove into a bus stop in Jerusalem’s French Hill junction, killing 26-year-old Jewish man Shalom Yohai Sherki.
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Israel’s new government sworn in amid raucous debate
(JNS.org) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new governing coalition was sworn in on Thursday evening amid a raucous Knesset session.
The Knesset voted 61-59 to approve Netanyahu’s fourth government after he worked until the last minute to finish appointing ministers from within his Likud party. Among those who received ministerial portfolios from Likud were Miri Regev, who becomes the culture and sport minister, Haim Katz, the new welfare minister, and Danny Danon, the new minister of science.
Netanyahu’s close ally, Yuval Steinitz, was put in charge of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission as energy minister and becomes a member of the security cabinet. Yisrael Katz replaces Steinitz as intelligence minister and also joins the security cabinet. Moshe Ya’alon will continue to serve as defense minister.
Two senior members of Likud, Gilad Erdan and Silvan Shalom, had eyed the foreign minister position. Erdan turned down Netanyahu’s offer continuing his position as interior minister in hopes of gaining the foreign minister portfolio, causing some last-minute drama before Thursday’s vote. But the foreign minister position was left vacant by Netanyahu with the hope of possibly attracting opposition leader Isaac Herzog to join the government.
“I am leaving the door open to expanding the government for two reasons. The first: because I think the state needs it. And second: because this is the only way to amend this [political system],” Netanyahu said, the Times of Israel reported.
But Herzog called the new government a “circus,” saying it was “not the government the people wanted.”
Joint Arab List leader Ayman Odeh, meanwhile, said that a “black flag of racism flies over this government.”
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U.S. House overwhelmingly passes bill giving Congress oversight of Iran deal
(JNS.org) The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, which would give Congress a 30-day period to review a final nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, in a 400-25 vote. The bill, which was previously passed in a 98-1 Senate vote, now goes to the desk of President Barack Obama.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) said in a statement after the bill’s House passage that it “continues to support diplomatic efforts to reach an agreement that prevents Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capability,” but added that it has “many serious concerns about the framework agreement [reached between Iran and world powers] that have only deepened since it was announced last month.”
“These concerns include the issues of infrastructure dismantlement, pace of sanctions relief, disclosure of prior weaponization efforts, inspections procedures, and the duration of restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program,” AIPAC said. “The Iran review legislation assures Congress a means to scrutinize and evaluate how these issues are addressed in any nuclear weapons agreement.”
Obama is expected to approve the oversight bill after initially vowing to veto a version of the legislation that gave Congress twice as long—60 days—to review a nuclear deal. A bipartisan compromise in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee also modified language in the bill that had eased Congress’s ability to re-impose sanctions on Iran if the Islamic Republic was found complicit in supporting terrorism, among other changes. The existing version of the legislation, however, maintains that Obama cannot waive sanctions during the Congressional review period.
The deadline for a final nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 nations is June 30.
“Congress is in a position to effectively and decisively judge and constrain President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, should a bad deal be struck,” U.S. Rep. Ed Royce (R-California) said Thursday.
“Of course, we all hope that Iran’s march toward a nuclear weapon can be diplomatically stopped,” added Royce. “This legislation should strengthen the administration’s hand at the negotiating table, but Secretary [of State John] Kerry must put its added leverage to use immediately so that the U.S. can gain much-needed ground in the negotiations over the next two months.”
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Saudi Arabia plans to match Iran in nuclear capability
(JNS.org) Officials from Saudi Arabia say they plan to match Iran in nuclear enrichment capability.
“We can’t sit back and be nowhere as Iran is allowed to retain much of its capability and amass its research,” an anonymous Arab leader at Thursday’s U.S.-organized Camp David summit told the New York Times. Former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal had said earlier this week, “Whatever the Iranians have, we will have, too.”
President Barack Obama is hosting Arab leaders from the Gulf Cooperation Council at the White House and Camp David this week to discuss the framework Iranian nuclear deal and other regional issues. A number of Arab leaders, including King Salman of Saudi Arabia, are not attending the summit in an apparent sign of displeasure with Obama’s Middle East policies.
Many Mideast experts have long warned that Iran’s nuclear program could set off a nuclear arms race in the region. Under the framework deal reached in April between Iran and world powers, Iran would be permitted to keep 5,000 nuclear centrifuges and conduct a limited amount of uranium enrichment.|
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Czech Republic stops Iranian purchase of compressors for nuclear enrichment
(JNS.org) An Iranian purchase of a large shipment of technology that could be used for nuclear enrichment has been thwarted by the Czech Republic due to suspicion that arose from false documentation, according to Western sources and United Nations experts.
The incident comes about six weeks before the P5+1 powers and Iran have a deadline to agree on a final nuclear deal, raising doubts about the Islamic Republic’s reliability on the nuclear issue.
Details of the attempted purchase, which were obtained by Reuters, appeared in the most recent annual report by an expert panel for the U.N. Security Council’s Iran sanctions committee. According to the report, Iran tried to buy compressors made by the U.S.-owned company Howden CKD Compressors in the Czech Republic. These compressors could be used for both nuclear and non-nuclear applications.
“Such compressors can be used to extract enriched uranium directly from the cascades,” Olli Heinonen, former deputy director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a nuclear expert currently working at Harvard University, told Reuters.
“In particular, they are useful when working with higher enrichment such as 20 percent-enriched uranium,” he said.
A Western diplomat and a Czech state official confirmed that Czech authorities stopped the purchase. Had the deal gone through, Howden CKD would have earned about 1.5 billion Czech koruna ($61 million). But none of the sources quoted by Reuters suggested that Howden CKD itself was involved in any illegal activities. The deal was noticed and stopped because “the procurer and transport company involved in the deal had provided false documentation in order to hide the origins, movement and destination of the consignment with the intention of bypassing export controls and sanctions,” said the U.N. panel.
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ADL leader at Israeli forum: anti-Semitism ‘worst it’s been since the 30s’
(JNS.org) Anti-Defamation League (ADL) National Director Abraham Foxman said at an Israeli conference that current levels of anti-Semitism around the world are not as bad as the levels that existed in 1930s Europe, but are “the worst it’s been since the 30s.”
“We’re living in an era where again anti-Semitism presents a clear and present danger to Jews in various communities. It’s global in its nature, and it’s endangering the lives of Jews—not just where they live or their livelihoods—and it has a dimension of terrorism, jihadism,” Foxman told Israel National News at the 5th Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism, held in Israel on Wednesday.
In order to address this problem, Foxman said, it is necessary to provide “physical safety and security” for Jewish communities, but also to clearly identify and label both the perpetrators and victims.
“There is a reluctance to identify sometimes not even the perpetrators but also the victims. It’s a sort of political correctness,” Foxman said, citing U.S. President Barack Obama’s reluctance to label the victims of January’s shooting at the Hyper Cacher market in Paris as Jewish, calling them instead “a bunch of folks,” or to identify their killer as a radical Muslim.
“If we’re to hesitant to describe the perpetrators and even the victims, it holds back our hand from acting,” warned Foxman.
Canadian Minister of Multiculturalism Tim Uppal, who also attended the Israeli forum, said that one major way in which the Canadian government is fighting anti-Semitism is by supporting Israel.
“I think one thing that can serve as an example to everyone is our strong support of Israel,” he said. “We as a country, as a government, do this not because it’s popular—we know it’s not popular—but because it’s the right thing to do.”
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