Israel Update 31.3.22

FURTHER TERROR ATTACKS

Two Israeli Arab terrorists from Umm al-Fahm opened fire at people at a bus stop in Hadera on Sunday. Two Israeli Border Police officers ran toward the site after hearing the gunshots and were killed in the exchange of fire, as were the assailants. “Our officers managed to neutralize the assailants and prevent a bigger terrorist attack” said an Israel Police spokesman. The Israeli officers were Yazan Falah, 19, a Druze citizen and woman officer Shirel Abukarat, 19. Four others were wounded, two seriously. Police found three guns, three knives and about a thousand bullets while searching the assailants. Read more here

A Palestinian terrorist fired an M-16 assault rifle at passers-by in Bnei Brak on Tuesday. He shot dead two Ukrainian workers Victor Sorokopot, 38, and Dimitri Mitrik, 23, as they sat outside a grocery store. Then he murdered Yaakov Shalom, 36, a father of four, in his car. Avishai Yehezkel, 29, had taken his 2-year-old son for an evening walk in his stroller when he was shot and killed, while trying to protect the boy. Two officers on a police motorcycle confronted and killed the shooter. However, Arab Israeli officer Amir Khoury, 32, was fatally wounded in the exchange of fire. Read more here

The perpetrator of Tuesday’s terror attack in Bnei Brak been working illegally at a construction site in the city. Read more here

On Thursday an Israeli man (28) was seriously injured after a Palestinian terrorist attacked him with a screwdriver on a bus. Read more here

COUNTER TERRORISM

The joint operation by Israeli security forces to stem the rising tide of terrorist attacks has been dubbed ‘Wave Breaker’. One IDF soldier was lightly injured and three Palestinian gunmen were reported killed in an exchange of gunfire in Jenin Thursday morning. IDF and Border Police had entered the city to arrest suspects in connection with the Bnei Brak terror attack.Read more here

THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY

The PA glorified the first terror attack in which 4 Israelis were murdered in Beersheba, praising the terrorist as Shahid (Islamic martyr). After criticism from Israel, the PA was silent about the second attack in Hadera in which 2 Israelis were murdered. And then only when Israel’s defence minister and the United States pressured Abbas did he issue a feeble condemnation of the Bnei Brak attack when 5 Israelis were murdered. These attacks came after 2 months of incitement to violence by Abbas and the P.A. Read more here

March 27 marked the 20th anniversary of the Passover Seder Massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya in 2002, when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up, murdering 30 people and injuring another 160. Every month since then, the Palestinian Authority spends thousands of dollars to reward the family of the bomber and pay salaries to the terrorists who were arrested for their part in the massacre. Read more here

NEGEV SUMMIT

At their historic summit in the Israeli Negev town of Sde Boker on Monday, the top diplomats of Israel, the US and four Arab nations, Egypt, Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates, announced that the conference would be the first iteration of a permanent regional forum, as they reaffirmed the importance of growing ties between Israel and the broader Middle East. The unprecedented gathering was widely seen as an attempt by Israel and its Arab allies to create a front against shared regional foe Iran. Read more here

The Negev summit is one of the strongest signs yet that (Israel) is beginning to reap the dividends of normalization deals, confirming a profound realignment of Middle Eastern powers… Israel and other countries in the region are also working to formalize a communication system that will allow each partner to warn one another in real time about incoming drones from Iran and its proxies. Read more here

ISRAELI FIELD HOSPITAL IN UKRAINE

Within the first five days of opening, the hospital treated more than 730 locals and refugees from other parts of Ukraine and performed 16,000 lab tests. Their ailments and injuries are mainly unrelated to the war. Read more here

Ukraine’s foreign minister thanked Israel on Friday for opening a field hospital in the western Ukraine. “I thank its team of Israeli physicians and paramedics for their important humanitarian mission and tireless work to help Ukrainian men, women, and children at this difficult time.” Read more here

Among the patients was a 10 year old girl suffering from a chronic heart condition who managed to escape the bombings to be treated at the hospital. Read more here

OTHER ISRAELI AID TO UKRAINE

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff praised Israel’s mediation efforts last Thursday, going out of his way to remark on the intelligence cooperation between Israel and Ukraine.Read more here

A group of Israeli ex-commandos has been training Ukrainian civilians at a secret facility in western Ukraine. Read more here

A 4-year-old Ukrainian girl suffering from a rare genetic disorder who was displaced from her home following the Russian invasion was saved at an Israeli medical clinic operated by staff from Hadassah Hospital and located in the Polish city Przemyśl, near the border with Ukraine. Read more here

Four Holocaust survivors were rescued from Russian shelling in Kyiv by Israeli charity Yad Ezer L’Haver, an Israeli foundation established in 2001 with the purpose of aiding Holocaust survivors in Israel. Read more here

Israeli mental health professionals are providing psychological phone support to Ukrainians, via a special hotline, and have already helped hundreds of people still in the warzone as well as refugees. The initiative capitalizes on the large number of Russian-speakers (and some Ukrainian speakers) in Israel’s healthcare community, and has quickly recruited more than 200 psychologists, social workers and others who can take calls. Read more here

UKRAINIAN NEW IMMIGRANTS IN ISRAEL

Sasha Zlobjn from Kharkiv, Ukraine, is the 10,000th person to immigrate to Israel from the former Soviet Union since Russia invaded Ukraine last month, arriving with his grandparents on Monday. More than two-thirds of the 10,000 people who have immigrated to Israel in the past month have come from Ukraine. The rest have come from Russia and Belarus. Read more here

CORONAVIRUS IN ISRAEL

Figures from last week, where available in brackets for comparison.

12,093 (13,603) new cases of the novel coronavirus were reported in Israel on Wednesday. 265 (301) coronavirus patients are in serious condition, with 102 (130) on ventilators. The death toll stands at 10,485 (10, 455) . Read more here

The fourth coronavirus vaccine resulted in a 78% decrease in COVID-19 related deaths in adults aged 60-100, a new study conducted by Clalit Health Services has found. Read more here

DEFENCE

The UK Defence Ministry in April will begin issuing body armour specially designed for women.
The Virtus Scalable Tactical Vest (STV) is manufactured by Israeli company Source Tactical Gear and has been in use by men in the British army since 2020. Read more here

GAZA

The Israeli government on Sunday raised the number of permits for Gazans to work in Israel by an additional 8,000 – to 20,000. The quota was raised to 12,000 only two weeks ago. Read more here

DEMOGRAPHIC UPDATE by Yoram Ettinger

Extracts:

In 2020, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate (number of births per woman) was 3.00, while the overall Arab fertility rate was 2.82. In 2021, Jewish births were 76% of total births…Israel’s Arab life expectancy (78 for men and 82 for women) is similar to the U.S. life expectancy and higher than that of any Arab or Muslim country.

Palestinian census figures are inflated. Half a million Palestinians who have lived overseas for over a year are included in the population census, in violation of internationally accepted rules. 350,000 Jerusalem Arabs, who possess Israeli ID cards, are double-counted.

In 2021, there was a 68% Jewish majority in the combined area of pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank (7.5 million Jews, 2 million Israeli Arabs and 1.5 million West Bank Arabs). Read more here

ARCHAEOLOGY

Archaeologist Dr. Scott Stripling and a team of international scholars, unveiled what he claims is the earliest proto-alphabetic Hebrew text ever discovered in ancient Israel. It was found at Mount Ebal, known from Deuteronomy 11:29 as a place of curses. If the Late Bronze Age (circa 1200 BCE) date is verified, this “curse tablet” would be the first attested use of the name of God in the Land of Israel and would set the clock back on proven Israelite literacy by several centuries. Read more here

SPORT

A refugee from Ukraine, Valentyna Veretska, 32 who fled the country along with her daughter, won the women’s race in Friday’s Jerusalem Marathon. Her husband is still in Ukraine, fighting against the Russian invasion. Read more here

TECHNOLOGY

Israel’s Brain.Space, startup that studies data on brain activity, is set to put its gear to test on astronauts in space next week during a SpaceX shuttle flight to the International Space Station (ISS). Three astronauts on the planned private space-flight firm Axiom Space’s mission to the ISS will use Brain.Space’s special electroencephalogram (EEG)-enabled helmet.Read more here

Indian electric scooter maker Ola Electric has made a multi-million dollar investment in StoreDot, an Israeli developer of extreme fast-charging (XFC) battery technology for electric vehicles. Ola Electric will manufacture and integrate StoreDot’s battery tech for future vehicles in India. Read more here

FOOD TECH

Wanda Fish, a new Israeli food tech startup, is partnering with Tufts University (USA) for advanced research into the development of cultivated fish as a food item.Read more here

TOURISM

Tel Aviv now has its own branch of the luxury Kempinski European hotel group, as the David Kempinski opens on Hayarkon Street. Read more here

COMMENT & OPINION

Seth J Frantzman : When news of a terror attack began to circulate on social media, a number of Palestinian Arabic-language media and social media accounts began to celebrate… if anyone needs to understand the depths to which the populist, nationalist, pro-terror, far-right Palestinian narrative has sunk over the decades, one need only witness how the murder of anyone in Israel is acceptable, be they Jewish, Arab or Ukrainian.

To murder a person randomly is a new definition of “heroic,” but this is what years of excusing these crimes as “resistance” have done.