Category Archives: Israel

Israel to prosecute Hasidic pilgrims who faked negative Covid tests to fly home

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Dozens of Hasidic Breslov pilgrims boarded planes in Ukraine with bogus paperwork, border officers say

Israel says it will prosecute dozens of pilgrims returning from Ukraine who flew back into the country with fake negative Covid test results.

The pilgrims had been attending the annual celebration of the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, in the Ukrainian city of Uman, where Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who founded the Hasidic Breslov sect in the early 19th century, is buried. He was a great-grandson of the founder of Hasidism.

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Israel prison break: escape allegedly took place while guard slept

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Israeli media describe errors that allowed rare jail break for high security Palestinian prisoners

The escape of six high security Palestinian prisoners from an Israeli prison took place amid a parade of farcical errors that included the reported availability of prison blueprints online and a sleeping guard in a watchtower.

As hundreds of Israeli troops scoured villages and the countryside for the escapees from Gilboa prison, including five members of Islamic Jihad and a high-profile figure from Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, reports in the Israeli media detailed a series of bungles by the country’s prison authority that allowed the rare jailbreak.

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Israel: one-year-old conjoined twin girls see each other for the first time after surgery – video

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One-year-old twin girls have looked at each other for the first time after a complex surgery to separate them at Soroka medical centre in Beersheba, Israel. Dozens of experts from Israel and abroad were involved in the preparation and 12-hour procedure. 

The team used 3D- and virtual-reality models to map the complex operation. This enabled simulations and practice to be undertaken before the actual procedure.

Soroka's chief paediatric neurosurgeon, Mickey Gideon, said: 'We have done the reconstruction of the brain membrane, a reconstruction of the skull and now the plastic surgeons continue the surgery for the sealing of the skin'

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Six Palestinian militants escape high-security Israeli prison – video

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Six Palestinian militants have broken out of a high-security Israeli prison in what the prime minister, Naftali Bennett, called a grave incident.

Israeli police and the military started a search after the escape from Gilboa prison in northern Israel on Monday.

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Six Palestinian militants escape from high-security Israeli prison

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Manhunt under way as prisons service says fugitives accessed passages under their cell

Six Palestinian militants have broken out of a high-security Israeli prison in what the prime minister, Naftali Bennett, called a grave incident.

Israeli police and the military started a search after the escape from Gilboa prison in northern Israel on Monday.

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The Palestinian Authority’s crackdown on protest shows it will never serve its own people | Yara Hawari

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Palestinians are being repressed and brutalised by their own government in collaboration with the Israeli state

  • Yara Hawari is a senior policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network

On 24 June, Nizar Banat, a longtime activist and outspoken critic of the Palestinian Authority (PA), was reportedly arrested and beaten outside his cousin’s home in Hebron by the authority’s security forces – he died in custody shortly after. In regular videos recorded and posted to his social media accounts, Banat often took the Palestinian Authority to task for its corruption, lack of democratic practice and collaboration with Israel. A few days prior to his death, he had uploaded a video in which he accused the authority of selling out the Palestinian struggle.

Related: Nizar Banat’s death highlights brutality of Palestinian Authority

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Israel registers record daily coronavirus cases

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Country to press ahead with school openings as it encourages all over-12s to get third jab

Israel has recorded its highest daily number of coronavirus cases with nearly 11,000 new infections, amid a surge caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant as schools prepare to re-open.

The previous high came on 18 January, with 10,118 cases.

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EU removes six countries including US from Covid safe travel list

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Travellers from Israel, Kosovo, Lebanon, Montenegro, and North Macedonia also affected by move

The EU has removed six countries, including the US, from a Covid “white list” of places whose tourists should be permitted entry without restrictions such as mandatory quarantine.

A majority of EU countries had reopened their borders to Americans in June, in the hope of salvaging the summer tourism season although most required a negative test ahead of travel. The move was not, however, reciprocated by the US.

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Palestinian boy shot by Israeli soldiers during clashes on Gaza border dies

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Omar Hassan Abu al-Nile was hit on the sidelines of a demonstration near the fence separating the Gaza Strip

A 12-year-old Palestinian boy shot last week by Israeli soldiers during clashes along the border with Gaza has died of his injuries, the territory’s health ministry said on Saturday.

Omar Hassan Abu al-Nile was hit last Saturday on the sidelines of a demonstration near the border fence separating the Gaza Strip from Israel, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa said. He “succumbed to his injuries”, Gaza’s health ministry said in a statement. About 100 mourners attended his funeral in the afternoon.

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Phones of nine Bahraini activists found to have been hacked with NSO spyware

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Researchers say bloggers and members of secular leftwing political group among the victims

The mobile phones of nine Bahraini activists, including two who were granted asylum protection and are now living in London, were hacked between June 2020 and February 2021 using NSO Group spyware, according to new findings by researchers at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

A report due to be released on Tuesday will reveal that the hacked activists, some of whose phones were being monitored by Citizen Lab researchers at the time they were hacked, include three members of Waad, a secular leftwing political group that was suspended in 2017 amid a crackdown on peaceful dissent in Bahrain.

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Israeli aircraft strike Hamas sites in Gaza as hostilities escalate

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Cross-border gunfire earlier on Saturday seriously injured an Israeli soldier and wounded 41 Palestinians

Israeli aircraft struck Hamas sites in Gaza late on Saturday, the military said, in an escalation of hostilities after earlier cross-border gunfire seriously injured an Israeli soldier and wounded 41 Palestinians, including two critically.

The injuries came during a Gaza protest organised by the enclave’s Islamist rulers, Hamas, and other factions in support of Jerusalem, where Palestinian clashes with Israeli police helped spark an 11-day Israel-Hamas conflict in May.

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Our art deals with real injustices, some in Palestine: no wonder we faced opposition « Forensic Architecture

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Our battle to restore a statement to a Manchester exhibition was really about what can and can’t be said in cultural spaces

On Wednesday, protesters in Manchester reclaimed one of the city’s main cultural institutions. Despite the rain, pro-Palestine activists gathered in front of the closed doors of the Whitworth gallery, part of the University of Manchester. It was because of their persistent action, and 13,000 letters sent to the gallery, that part of our exhibition, a printed statement titled “Forensic Architecture stands with Palestine”, has been reinstated. The exhibition, which we insisted be shut as a result of the statement’s unilateral removal, has now reopened.

On Sunday 15 August, a blog post on the website of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) announced that, following the group’s intervention, the statement had been removed from our exhibition, Cloud Studies. When we first heard of the news, we were not altogether surprised. The same group had already criticised a statement of solidarity with Palestinians published on the Whitworth’s website in June, and succeeded in convincing the university to have it removed. And this was hardly UKLFI’s first attack on us as an organisation. In 2018, when we were nominated for the Turner prize, UKLFI urged the Tate not to award the prize to us on the outrageous grounds that documents that we had published in relation to Palestine amounted to “modern blood libels likely to promote antisemitism and attacks on Jews”.

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How a lone aid worker in Gaza ended up on trial for the largest theft of aid money in history

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Mohammed El Halabi is accused of stealing relief money and giving it to Hamas for their war effort against Israel. But five years on, the evidence against him looks seriously flawed

At about 9am on 12 July 2016, dozens of Israeli security officers stormed through the gates of the Augusta Victoria hospital complex in East Jerusalem. They surged past the hospital, which mostly serves the local Palestinian population, and through the main car park to a three-storey building where the offices of the international charity World Vision were located.

The officers, some armed with rifles, ordered the charity’s few dozen staff into a meeting room and seized their phones to prevent them contacting the outside world. According to witnesses, they were kept there for the next four hours. Occasionally, Israeli police and intelligence agents called an employee out of the room for questioning, while others roamed the offices, searching through files.

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Among ruins of bombed city towers, Gazans still reel from shock and pain

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Three months on from the devastating conflict, little has been rebuilt of the bombed high-rises that were homes and offices

Four years ago, Jehad Judah was pleased to be able to afford to buy his family a flat in al-Jalaa, a 14-storey building in downtown Gaza City. The upscale tower block was home to about 700 people as well as lawyers, computer software businesses and journalism bureaus belonging to the Associated Press of the US and Qatar’s Al Jazeera.

The 54-year-old bespectacled civil servant spent the first 30 years of his life living in the jumble of breeze-block housing of a nearby refugee camp. After he met his wife in 2001, the couple moved to Gaza to start a family. The Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the strip which came along a few years later made life in the city hard, but al-Jalaa still offered a decent standard of living, he said.

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Poland’s president signs bill to curb claims on property seized by Nazis

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Move to limit Jewish people’s opportunity to seek restitution sparks furious response from Israel

Poland’s president has decided to sign a bill that would set limits on the ability of Jews to recover property seized by Nazi German occupiers and retained by postwar communist rulers, drawing fury from Israel, which said the law was antisemitic.

“I made a decision today on the act, which in recent months was the subject of a lively and loud debate at home and abroad,” Andrzej Duda said in a statement published on Saturday. “After an in-depth analysis, I have decided to sign the amendment.”

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Booster jabs for rich countries will cause more deaths worldwide, say experts

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Oxford Vaccine Group and Gavi say western leaders must not ‘reject their responsibility to the rest of humanity’

Many more people around the world will die of Covid if western political leaders “reject their responsibility to the rest of humanity” by prioritising booster shots for their own populations instead of sharing doses, the head of the Oxford vaccine group has warned.

Writing for the Guardian, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, and Seth Berkley, the chief executive of Gavi, the vaccine alliance, say that the scientific and public health case for large-scale boosting has not been made and could have far-reaching consequences in other countries.

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Israel preparing to resume settlement building in West Bank

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Minister says there are plans for 2,000 new housing units for Jewish settlers in Palestinian territories

Israel is preparing to resume settlement building in the occupied West Bank after a hiatus of almost a year, the country’s defence minister has said.

A planning council committee is expected to meet next week to approve 2,000 new housing units for Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories, Benny Gantz said on Wednesday, as well as about 1,000 units for Palestinians living in the West Bank’s Area C, which is under Israeli military control.

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Israel’s shadow war with Iran

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A spate of attacks on one of the world’s busiest shipping trade routes is part of an escalating tit-for-tat conflict playing out between Iran and Israel, says Martin Chulov, the Guardian’s Middle East correspondent

In the last week of July, an oil tanker managed by an Israeli company was making a routine journey from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates when it was hit by an explosive, believed to be a drone. Two men, a Romanian and a British national, were killed in the attack. The Israeli government immediately blamed Iran who has denied any part in it.

The Guardian’s Middle East correspondent, Martin Chulov, tells Nosheen Iqbal that it is the latest action in what is now a rapidly escalating ‘shadow war’ between Israel and Iran. With both countries under new leadership in recent weeks, there is an added layer of unpredictability to relations that have been tense for some time.

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Israel targets Hamas sites after balloons from Gaza ignite fires

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Israeli military says strikes target rocket launching site as balloons aim to pressure Israel to ease restrictions

Israeli aircraft bombed Hamas sites in the Gaza Strip in response to incendiary balloons launched from the Palestinian enclave, Israel’s military said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage from the strikes on Saturday that targeted what the military said was a rocket launching site and a compound belonging to Hamas, the Islamist group that rules Gaza.

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Israel launches airstrikes in Lebanon in response to rockets

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Israeli military says jets struck rocket launch sites, in a marked escalation of hostilities

Israel escalated its response to rocket attacks this week by launching airstrikes on Lebanon, the Israeli military has said.

The military said in a statement that jets struck the launch sites from which rockets had been fired over the previous day, as well as an additional target used to attack Israel in the past. Several militant groups operate in Lebanon but none claimed responsibility.

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