RSS
1 dead, 5 wounded in shooting attack at Jerusalem checkpoint with long security lines
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Gunmen killed one soldier and injured five others Thursday in an attack at a West Bank checkpoint connecting Jerusalem and Israeli settlements to the south.
Israeli security sources say the attack was a failed attempt by Hamas, the Gaza-based terror group, to carry out a wider massacre in Jerusalem. Two of the attackers were from the southern West Bank city of Hebron, according to Israeli officials. In their car, security officials say they found outfits resembling IDF uniforms and enough weapons and ammunition for a larger-scale attack.
Following its Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, Hamas hoped to inspire attacks against Israelis in the West Bank. Since that date, the territory has seen a spike in violence, including an uptick in Israeli military raids on suspected terror cells. There has also been a rash of Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian villages, forcing their occupants out. Since Oct. 7, at least one other Israeli has been killed in a terror attack on a West Bank road, and more than 100 Palestinians have been killed, largely by Israeli forces.
Security at West Bank checkpoints has also increased since the war’s outbreak, forcing Israeli motorists to wait in long lines. Perhaps ironically, those long waits leave the drivers exposed to shooting attacks like the one on Thursday, said Oded Revivi, mayor of the nearby West Bank settlement of Efrat.
“In order to make sure that whoever enters Jerusalem is safe, you can sometimes have a roadblock which goes back for a mile,” Revivi told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That is probably bigger, the amount of people that are stuck in there, than [live in] some of the Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria,” a biblical term for the West Bank.
“So all of a sudden, that becomes a target. Anybody who wants to do harm can just go into that traffic jam, everybody’s stuck in their cars, there is no first response unit there, there is nowhere to run away from,” he added. “And so there are different scenarios which make the reality very scary and very worrying.”
Oded Revivi, head of the Efrat Local Council, says West Bank residents are more vulnerable on the roads than in their homes. (Eliyahu Freedman)
The soldier killed on Thursday was Corporal Avraham Fetena, 20, from Haifa. The five other people wounded were also members of security forces.
Israel’s Shin Bet security agency identified one of the three terrorists, all of whom were killed during the encounter, as the 28-year-old son of Hamas’ former head in Hebron, according to local reports.
The checkpoint where the shooting occurred leads to a tunnel highway in the southern West Bank that was built to shield Israeli drivers from terror attacks when commuting between Jerusalem and Israeli settlements. A second major tunnel is currently being added to ease traffic. During the Second Intifada, a large fence was also built to prevent shooting attacks on the new road to Jerusalem, which is restricted to Israeli vehicles and leads to the checkpoint.
But even prior to Thursday’s shooting, Revivi said that local Israeli settlers’ “sense of security has definitely been hit extremely hard,” in spite of what he says is the “greatest army presence in the West Bank in the last 10 years.”
The Israeli government is offering weapons and funding for West Bank settlements to ramp up security, and to equip them to fend off the kind of attack Israel experienced on Oct. 7. But Revivi said the state needs to do more to ensure the settlers’ security.
“We have to understand at the end of the day that we only have one army, they’re the ones who’s supposed to provide security for all these different scenarios,” Revivi said. “And there’s absolutely no way that we can provide ourselves the level of security to the most extreme scenario based on civilian funds.”
—
The post 1 dead, 5 wounded in shooting attack at Jerusalem checkpoint with long security lines appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Iran Says Eight Arrested for Suspected Links to Israel’s Mossad Spy Agency
The Mossad recruitment ad. Photo: Screenshot.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to transmit the coordinates of sensitive sites and details about senior military figures to Israel’s Mossad, Iranian state media reported.
They are accused of having provided the information to the Mossad spy agency during Israel’s air war on Iran in June, when it attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and killed top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
A Guards statement alleged that the suspects had received specialized training from Mossad via online platforms. It said they were apprehended in northeastern Iran before carrying out their plans, and that materials for making launchers, bombs, explosives and booby traps had been seized.
State media reported earlier this month that Iranian police had arrested as many as 21,000 “suspects” during the 12-day war with Israel, though they did not say what these people had been suspected of doing.
Security forces conducted a campaign of widespread arrests and also stepped up their street presence during the brief war that ended in a US-brokered ceasefire.
Iran has executed at least eight people in recent months, including nuclear scientist Rouzbeh Vadi, hanged on August 9 for passing information to Israel about another scientist killed in Israeli airstrikes.
Human rights groups say Iran uses espionage charges and fast-tracked executions as tools for broader political repression.
RSS
Body of Idan Shtivi, Murdered on Oct. 7, Retrieved from Gaza in Special IDF Operation
Idan Shtivi. Photo: Courtesy of the family
i24 News – The body of Idan Shtivi, a 28-year-old murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet in central Gaza, it was cleared for publication on Saturday.
Shtivi’s remains were returned to Israel alongside the body of Ilan Weiss, another hostage killed during the October 7 massacre.
“Idan Shtivi was abducted from the Tel Gama area and brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists after acting to rescue and evacuate others from the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. He was 28 years old at the time of his death,” read an IDF press release.
“Following an identification process conducted at the National Center for Forensic Medicine, along with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters notified his family.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shviti “was a gifted student of sustainability and governance, and a courageous individual” who acted heroically on October 7, helping others flee.
“He was killed in the process and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas. My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the Shtivi family. So far, 207 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive. We will continue to act tirelessly and decisively to bring back all our hostages—living and deceased.”
RSS
Woman Stabbed at Ottawa Grocery Store in Latest Antisemitic Attack
A social media post by the alleged attacker, Joseph Rooke of Cornwall, Ontario. Photo: Screenshot via i24
i24 News – The stabbing of a Jewish woman at an Ottawa grocery by a man with a long history of antisemitic posts on social media, the latest antisemitic hate crime in Canada, sparked outrage and prompted condemnation from officials including the prime minister.
Both the victim and the attacker are in their 70s. The woman is reportedly in serious condition.
The suspect was identified as Joseph Rooke, who has authored a series of lengthy rambling screeds on social media, ranting against Israel and Jews.
“Judaism is the world’s oldest cult,” he writes in one post, going on to say “over time jews have become insidious in governments, businesses, media conglomerates, and educational institutions in order to do what they do better than anyone else. Jews are the world’s masters of propaganda, gaslighting, demonization, demagoguery, and outright lying. Using their collective wealth they have become masters of reprisal.”
“I am under no obligation whatsoever, legal, moral, or otherwise, to like jews and I do not. If that means I meet the jewish definition of an anti-semite, so be it.”
Canada has seen a steep spike in antisemitic attacks over the past two years, including a recent incident in Montreal where a Hasidic Jew was beaten in front on his children.
After Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the incident, many, including former Israel’s ambassador the US Michael Oren, pointed out that Carney’s rhetoric and policies contribute to the increasing insecurity of Canada’s Jewish community through uncritical embrace of outrageous and easily disprovable allegations that Israel and its supporters were guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.