Israel Update 4.4.19
REMAINS OF ISRAELI MIA SOLDIER RETURNED TO ISRAEL.
Sgt. First Class Zachary Baumel will be buried in Jerusalem on Thursday 37 years after he died during the First Lebanon War in 1982 at the age of 21. His father died 10 years ago and his mother Miriam is 90.
Throughout the years, his family had relied on small tidbits of information that seemed to indicate Zachary was alive, including initial reports from international journalist and the Syrian media that Israeli soldiers from a tank crew were paraded through Damascus in a “victory march.” His father had believed that he remained alive and spent years travelling around the world to try to find him.
A commander of a Palestinian terrorist group in Syria said that Baumel’s remains were uncovered by armed factions at a Palestinian refugee camp outside Damascus. Israel has expanded vast resources over the past 37 years to discover his whereabouts and those of two other Israeli soldiers who remain missing in action -Zvi Feldman and Yehuda Katz.
20 sets of remains arrived in Israel after two years of work; Moscow facilitated operation initiated in Israel by former defence minister Lieberman; only match so far is Baumel.
GAZA VIOLENCE
The IDF on Saturday morning apprehended two eight-year-old boys from Gaza who crossed the border fence with a knife. The boys were sent back to Gaza
Five rockets were launched towards Israel from Gaza on Saturday night. Earlier, Palestinians reported that 4 were killed and more than 200 injured in clashes along Gaza’s security fence with Israel, as thousands rioted to mark Land Day and the first anniversary of the weekly “March of Return”.Over 40,000 Gazans gathered along the fence, hurling stones and hand grenades.
More than 2,000 violent incidents emanated from Gaza in the past year. As at Wednesday last week, Gazans launched 1,233 rockets, hurled 94 explosive devices and 600 firebombs across the security fence, and committed 152 acts of arson against Israeli forces. Rocket fire killed one Israeli and injured 126. Attacks on the security fence killed one Israeli soldier and wounded 16. Arson kites torched thousands of acres of Israeli farmland, causing over $9.5 million in damage.
Israeli defence officials on Monday warned that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad appeared to be planning to conduct a large-scale terror attack on the Gaza border in order to derail ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas
Islamic Jihad is rapidly becoming an Iranian proxy, operated by an on/off switch by Tehran to stir up trouble in Gaza whenever Iran needs to create a distraction, retaliation or send a message. Iran’s financial support for Islamic Jihad has dramatically increased and the group is becoming increasingly untamable
Israeli President Rivlin said during a visit to Canada, “The people of Gaza are not our enemy. We have no war with Islam.” adding, “For years, our citizens in the south have lived with missiles from Gaza. Sleeping in bomb shelters, night after night for years, is a reality that is hard to grasp. Just last week a rocket fired from Gaza hit a house in central Israel and wounded seven people, including a six-month-old baby. These rockets are fired by Hamas, a ruthless and cruel terrorist organization.”
VIDEO
In just two minutes, British Colonel Richard Kemp delivered his eyewitness testimony to the UNHCR commission of enquiry into the Gaza riots: “I accuse this commission of twisting organized violence into ‘peaceful protest’, and falsely accusing Israel” He also accused the commission of acting as an instrument of Hamas terrorism .
MOZAMBIQUE
In the deadly wake of a cyclone in Mozambique, Israel’s Sheba Medical Centre-Tel HaShomer is joining forces with IsraAID to help establish field hospitals, set up disease treatment centres, and treat survivors.
SIERRA LEONE
A girls’ school in Sierra Leone’s capital Freeport has received Israeli technology that produces fresh, safe, drinking water out of air. Watergen’s GEN-350 atmospheric water generator can produce up to 900 litres of water per day. Water pollution is one of the leading causes of death in the country, which has an average life expectancy of 56 years, one of the lowest in the world.
ATTACK THWARTED
A Palestinian attempted to open the door of an Israeli vehicle stuck in a traffic jam and stab a teenage girl near the village of Huwara in the West Bank on Wednesday. The Israeli father, who was driving his daughter to school, shot and killed the attacker.
MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY
Israel a country of just 8 million people has begun leveraging its medical data to create new opportunities in the analysis and optimization of patient treatment.
KURDISH DELEGATION VISIT
Reently, a Kurdish delegation from Iraq and Syria visited Israel. Dr. Hussein Saudo from Afrin, Syria, described his visit to Israel’s Sheba Medical Centre: “We saw Israeli humanitarianism in action, how they treat children from a foreign country free of charge, how Israel invests in technology to save children who would otherwise die, and what I was impressed the most by was that most of the team, who were Jewish, were treating children from Kurdistan, Gaza, Syria and other countries, which caused me to cry tears of joy.”He added that, in light of his visit to the Golan, he understands why Israel holds onto the territory: “The Golan Heights is a pearl of stability in the region only because it is controlled by Israel and there is no reason for Israel to give up those territories. The Golan Heights must remain under Israeli control in order to preserve regional security.”
ANALYSIS
David Collier puts the Arab-Israeli conflict into context:
Example: A graph shows the difference between the number of Palestinians recognised as refugees today by UNWRA (5 million ) against how many would be recognised as refugees had the situation been managed by the regular UN refugee agency UNHCR: – (NIL)
Example: When compared to other situations where populations were moved… the events of 1948 were small in number and almost negligible in the death count. In fact in both the numbers of those who fled and the number of fatalities (however we view each fatality as tragic), the Palestinian ‘Nakba’ ranks towards the level of ‘insignificant’ when placed alongside comparable events. (India/Pakistan is the highest number)
COMMENT & OPINION
Jeff Robbins:Since its armed takeover of Gaza in 2007, Hamas has sentenced Gazans to ever-deepening poverty, ripping off tens of millions of dollars of what was supposed to be humanitarian aid in order to build tunnels to attackIsrael.
COMMENT:US RECOGNITION OF GOLAN ISRAEL SOVREIGNTY
Alan Dershowitz: It would be suicidal for Israel to hand the high ground on the Golan Heights overlooking Israeli towns and villages to the Syrian mass murderer Assad who would use it to target Israelis civilians with chemical barrel bombs, as Assad has done to his own citizens. No country in history has ever given back to a sworn enemy, militarily essential territory that has been captured in a defensive war.
Douglas J Feith: There is a sound rationale for America’s recognizing the Golan Heights as a permanent part of Israel…Syria’s borders do not have deep roots in religion, culture, or history. They reflect nothing profounder than the interests of France and Britain at a moment in the early 20th century. Some countries in the Middle East such as Egypt and Persia have long histories as independent powers. Syria is not one of them. It was a region of the Turkish Empire for 400 years until British forces conquered it in World War I. Until the 1920 post-World War I peace conference, there had never been a nation called “Syria.”
Shany Mor: The accusation that Israel and the U.S. are violating diplomatic and legal norms rests on taking the armistice lines created in 1949 between Israel and its Arab neighbors as de facto international borders and tries to apply to them the same standards of territorial integrity as an internationally recognized boundary. The problem is that the armistice agreements explicitly say the opposite, that the lines “are not to be interpreted as having any relation whatsoever to ultimate territorial arrangements.” Syria, Egypt, and Jordan assumed that in a future war they might conquer more territory and didn’t want to be saddled with a binding line. The armistice lines were the lines at which a previous war stopped. But two more wars were fought on the Israeli-Syrian frontier, and those ended up with clear lines, too.
Noam A. Rotem:The name Golan appears for the first time in the Bible in the book of Deuteronomy as allocated to the tribe of Menashe…In the days of the Mishna and the Talmud (200-500 CE), many Jewish communities existed in the Golan, as evidenced by the writings of the Jewish sages and backed by archaeological findings.From the beginning of Ottoman rule in 1300 until the middle of the 19th century, the Golan was mostly a desolate frontier region… At the end of the 19th century, several attempts were made by Jews to resettle in the Golan, including on lands purchased by Baron Rothschild.At the start of the 1967 Six-Day War, the Syrians shelled the Hula Valley and the town of Rosh Pina, and Syrian tanks tried to advance toward Kibbutz Dan. In the last days of the war, the Israel conquered the Golan Heights and put an end to the threat of Syrian shelling.
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