Ynet News - With the new school year approaching, Sunday's cabinet meeting revolved mainly around the fortification efforts made in Sderot and the Gaza vicinity communities' schools.
Education Minister Yuli Tamir told ministers about the troubled area's preparations for the school year, and asked the defense forces "to vouch for the safety of Sderot's school children."
Deputy Defense Minister MK Matan Vilna'i (Labor-Meimad), filling in for Defense Minister Ehud Barak, responded by saying "I'll vouch for that if the education minister vouches for no violence in schools and if the transportation minister guarantees no more car accidents."
The fortification of Sderot and the Gaza vicinity schools had been the focus of a well-publicized disagreement between the High Court and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert –the former criticizing the prime minister for not doing enough and the latter insisting he has the final say.
Sources close to Yuli Tamir said her request was made on behalf of Sderot's parents, who asked the Home Front Command to certify the city's classrooms. Sources in Vilnai's office, meanwhile, said he had made it clear that the IDF is doing everything possible to keep the children safe.
"We are building 16 new schools in the (Gaza vicinity) area. They will be completely fortified and up to the highest code… it's time stop the sanctimonious ranting about nothing being done. What we're planning there is revolutionary," he added.
Ha'aretz - Israel has proposed that safe passage for the Palestinians from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip be included in an exchange of territory with the Palestinians in the framework of the agreement of principles now being formulated ahead of the upcoming regional summit.
(IsraelNN.com) Arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat’s doctor has confirmed the long-circulating rumors that the PLO chairman had AIDS – though the doctor insists Israel poisoned Arafat as well, causing his death.
Rumors have long circulated in both Israel and the Palestinian Authority that Arafat’s symptoms prior to his death were caused by AIDS. Within the PA, Israel has always been accused of poisoning the PLO chairman.
Now, Arafat’s private doctor has joined other PLO officials in acknowledging that Arafat had the HIV virus, but is holding on to the claim that Israel was responsible for his ultimate demise, in a French hospital.
J-Post: New Jersey-native Yechiel Aaron has decided to start a new political party to advocate for the annexation of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.
Lashuv (Return) represented a "return to our ways of strength," he told The Jerusalem Post over the weekend. "It is the return to where we care more about God, our country and our people."
Aaron, who immigrated to Israel with his family two years ago and lives in Hashmonaim, near Modi'in, would not provide the names of those running on his party list, only saying that he had many supporters around the country and in the United States. Lashuv would be radically right wing on the Palestinians and the diplomatic process, but offered some interesting twists on economic policy, he said.
Asked how he would deal with the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, he said that if they observed Israeli law they would be provided with citizenship after a 25-year waiting period.
Hope you enjoyed the nosh...
(IsraelNN.com) A Kassam rocket attack by Israel Palestinian Authority terrorists in Gaza reached the home of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon Thursday afternoon. One rocket exploded near a sheep barn on Sharon’s Shikmim Ranch in the Negev.
The former Prime Minister remains unconscious at a Tel Aviv hospital after suffering a massive stroke a year and a half ago.
No injuries were reported in the Kassam attack. The second rocket slammed into the western Negev city of Sderot, which has been the target of constant bombardment by terrorists in Gaza for the past seven years. No injuries or damage were reported in Sderot.
While the self-loathers may have the upper hand right now in the civil war, they are still just paper tigers who will flee in the face of real military response from the Judeans when the time comes. Enjoy your victories now wretched leftists, because the time will come when the Religious Zionists gain the upper hand and you self-loathers will be projectile vomited out of the Promised Land.Arutz Sheva - On the heels of the forced eviction of two Jewish families from Hevron’s Shalhevet neighborhood – four more Hevron families living in the area have received eviction notices.
In response to a petition by Peace Now, Israel’s Civil Administration has issued expulsion orders against four Jewish-held storefronts in the “triangle” marketplace area of the city, located in close proximity to the area where two Jewish families were expelled by the IDF on Tuesday.
Like the wholesale market, the triangle marketplace was built by Hevron’s Arabs on top of the ruins of the city’s Jewish Quarter after the city's Arabs murdered nearly all Jewish residents during the 1929 pogroms.
(IsraelNN.com) The expulsion of two families from their homes in the Shalhevet neighborhood, built on the site of the former Hevron marketplace, was completed late Tuesday morning. Three thousand Border Guard officers, Yassam special forces and IDF soldiers forcibly evicted the families as well as hundreds of their supporters in an operation that began in the wee hours.
Three young protestors were the last holdouts in a cement bunker which was eventually breached by an IDF Search and Rescue unit.
Eyewitnesses reported that the IDF demolished all of the homes built in the neighborhood...
Army officials had promised permits a year and a half ago to the eleven families who lived in the neighborhood, saying they would be allowed to return with legal status on the condition they left the premises peacefully. Nine of the families cooperated with the government officials, believing they would make good on their end of the deal. Attorney General Menachem Mazuz quickly voided the promise after they moved out, saying the army officials had no authority to make the agreement.
Hebron.com - Today, the 78th anniversary of the 1929 riots and massacre in Hebron, which left 67 dead and the surviving population expelled from the city, Defense Minister Ehud Barak personally decided to expel two more families from the city, from their homes in the Shalhevet neighborhood (the shuk).
The Hebron Community council expresses deep pain and protest at the desecration of the memories of the 1929 victims and the continuation of forced expulsion, this time not by Arabs, rather by Jews, expelling their brothers.
According to information received by the community, about 1,000 police, riot squad forces and soldiers will execute the expulsion late Sunday night - early Monday morning. The community calls on anyone to whom Hebron and Eretz Yisrael are important to, to flock to Hebron as early as this coming Saturday night, following Shabbat, in order to take an active role in the protest and struggle. Most likely Israeli security forces will close all roads leading to Hebron sometime Monday, so it is important to arrive as early as possible.
(IsraelNN.com) Families are going about their daily affairs. Children play outside their homes, with crayons and coloring books, in what was for centuries a graceful Jewish Quarter in the holy city of Hevron. A long-skirted woman, hair covered with a scarf, is washing the floor of her home.
You’d never know that 3,000 police officers, soldiers and Yassam SWAT teams are waiting for the word to pour into the area in hundreds of buses – to evict two families, and an undetermined number of supporters who plan to stand together with them.
The plan is reminiscent of the 2005 Disengagement operation in which 12,000 government forces expelled some 8,000 Jews from 25 communities in northern Samaria and the Gush Katif region of Gaza.
It brings to life the memory of the government-ordered “evacuation” of activists protesting the destruction of nine empty buildings in a planned neighborhood outside the community of Amona, carried out by thousands of Yassam police. Many were mounted on horses, which in some cases were used to trample the protestors. It is not known whether the Yassam will bring their horses Monday night.
Jewish-owned Land
The land on which the Hevron market stands is Jewish-owned, purchased in 1540 by Rabbi Malkiel Ashkenazai, a refugee from the Spanish expulsion in 1492. For centuries, it provided a haven for Jews, who went about their daily affairs then too, until their slaughter by Arabs in 1929 and the exile of those who managed to stay alive.
Jewish-owned property, houses and synagogues were left empty as residents fled for their lives.
The Jordanians who took control of the area transformed one section of the lovely Jewish Quarter into an open air market after that massacre. A synagogue in the beautiful Avinu Avraham neighborhood, as it is called, was turned into a goat yard.
Hevron, liberated by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, gradually became home to Jews once more, although its Arab residents were allowed to continue to operate the market and sell their wares.
