Days after returning from Hamas captivity, Agam Berger presented her sister with the symbolic purple lanyard at the IDF Human Resources NCO graduation ceremony in Ir HaBahadim.
Recently, Hamas criticized the Palestinian Authority's operations in the area, accusing Abbas of committing war crimes.
Late last week, the Rafah Crossing reopened to traffic, and in the past two days, the Palestinian Authority has become involved in its operations - despite promises otherwise by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Yediot Aharonot reported.
According to the report, Palestinian Authority representatives are operating the crossing together with a European force and Egyptian security forces. Israel has no presence at the crossing but is indirectly involved in approving who may exit Gaza.
According to reports, Fars a-Rifi was appointed to manage the police station which will beset up at the crossing. A-Rifi is a Fatah operative in Gaza, who formerly served as the PA's police chief in Central Gaza.
Over the past month, the Palestinian Authority has prepared to take control of the crossing, and has held meetings with Egyptian and Israeli sources for this purpose.
MK Itamar Ben Gvir (Otzma Yehudit) responded to the reports, saying: "The government of Israel continues to break its promises and violate the principles it said it would keep, due to this reckless deal. The Prime Minister emphasized countless times that he will not allow the Palestinian Authority to manage the crossing and that this would be a security threat, but unfortunately on this matter as well he caved in."
"The government is allowing the Palestinian Authority -the same one which distributes salaries to terrorists- to control the gate to Gaza. How low will we go?"
“Before our discussion on the subject in question has been completed, and before the process of formulating the state’s position with respect to the aforementioned petitions has been completed, MK Ben Gvir announced his resignation from the government. Under these circumstances, I intend to ask the court to order the deletion of the petitions, while upholding the parties’ arguments,” the AG wrote.
She added: “As you consider appointing MK Ben Gvir as a member of the government in the future, an examination of the relevant, up-to-date factual infrastructure will be required, including that which has recently been presented to you. This future examination will be carried out, to the extent necessary, in light of the rules of administrative law, and bearing in mind that this will be considered a new appointment.”
On November 11, 2024, Baharav-Miara sent a letter to Netanyahu urging him to reconsider his stance on the tenure of Minister Ben Gvir. In the letter, she expressed concern over Ben Gvir’s alleged improper interference in police operations and the influence he held over police promotions, which she believed compromised the police’s ability to serve the public impartially rather than in alignment with political interests.
The November letter was part of a broader process to form an official stance on Ben Gvir’s tenure in preparation for the state’s response to the High Court of Justice which had ordered the AG to submit her response by the evening of the 11th. In her letter, Baharav-Miara emphasized that the recent developments, combined with previous events leading up to the petition, pointed to a troubling and ongoing pattern of legal violations, undermining basic governance principles, and politicizing the police force.
Netanyahu received Ben Gvir’s response to the allegations presented against him in the High Court ahead of the hearing on the petitions demanding his removal. In December, Netanyahu was planning to inform the AG that he rejected her claim that Ben Gvir should be removed from his position and that he intended to defend him in the High Court of Justice (via an independent attorney – DI).
Netanyahu was expected to deliver his stance to the AG during their following meeting a week later, as both the PM and the AG were required to submit their responses to the High Court of Justice, after which a date for the hearing on the petitions would be scheduled.
Shortly thereafter, on January 19, three days after stating that he would resign from the government if the hostage deal was approved, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir followed through on his pledge and announced his resignation, along with the resignation of his party’s government ministers.
By David Israel JP
A new survey has found that the majority of Israelis support formal annexation of Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley.
The survey, carried out to measure support of Jewish sovereignty over all or some of Judea and Samaria, examined the Israeli public’s views regarding sovereignty versus a Palestinian state, sovereignty versus the option of peace with Saudi Arabia, and more.
The resulting data showed that 71 percent of those polled oppose a Palestinian state in light of the Simchat Torah massacre events including twelve percent who supported such a state prior to October 7, 2023.
A total of 68 percent support applying sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (across all sovereignty options), the survey found.
DIN regrets to inform you of the Petira of Chazzan Bentzion Miller Z”L, one of the greatest and most prestigious Chazzanim in the world in the past 45 years. He was 77.
On a personal note, this is a very sad day for my family as we grew up together and our families were very close! My mother a"h was R' Ben-Zion mother's best friend!
Reb Bentzion, a longtime resident of Boro Park, was born in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Ferenwald, Germany. Like his father Reb Aharon Daniel Z”L, he eventually became a Shochet, Mohel and a Chazzan, and was from a family of Bobover Chassidim.
He held held positions in Montreal at Sheves Achim Synagogue on Côte-des-Neiges, then in Toronto at Shaarei Tefillah Synagogue on Bathurst Street, in Canada. In 1981 he became Chazan of Temple Beth El of Boro Park in Brooklyn, a pulpit served by Mordechai Hershman, Berele Chagy, Moshe Koussevitzky, and Moshe Sterm, and continued as Chazan of the Shul, now Congregation Young Israel Beth El, after its merger with Young Israel of Boro Park.
His beautiful, well-trained voice, uplifted the souls of hundreds of thousands of Yidden around the globe over his career spanning many decades, as he preformed around the globe, and appeared on many recordings. He was very instrumental in strengthening the genre of Chazzanus over the past 25 years, to which there is now a very large audience.
A few months ago, he suddenly took ill overseas. He was eventually flown back to New York, where he was Niftar on Monday morning.
The Levaya will be held at Shomrei Hadas Chapels at 12:30PM.
Boruch Dayan HaEmmes…
Watch Video of Funeral
https://webcast.funeralvue.com/events/viewer/109293/hash:D7E09E7B25CFA333
When President Donald Trump last week fired two Democratic commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Charlotte A. Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels, along with EEOC General Counsel Karla Gilbride, The New York Times predictably howled it was a “late night purge.”
Democrats will likely launch a legal holy war to overturn Trump’s action — because it was a dagger strike at his effort to once and for all end affirmative action.
The EEOC firings followed Trump’s executive orders canceling federal diversity, equity and inclusion mandates and prohibiting federal agencies from imposing racial, ethnic or gender quotas.
For more than half a century, the EEOC has been dishonestly dictating quotas to American businesses, schools and other institutions.
President Donald Trump recently floated a fantastic idea: Arab nations, he said, should accept large numbers of Gazans as refugees, a move that “could be temporary or long term.”
The accommodation would allow Israel to eliminate the remnants of Hamas, which, in turn, would allow the international community to rebuild Gaza.
Not only would such a policy enhance the prospects of peace, but it’s also humane.
While Gazans shouldn’t be compelled to move from their homes, they should be allowed to escape the generational tragedy foisted on them by the Arab world and their nihilistic leaders. And Israelis should monetarily incentivize them to move to safer environs.
Because one of the prevailing myths of the Israel-Arab conflict is that Palestinians have a deep historic connection to the land that goes back centuries.
It’s debatable, considering evidence shows that most Arabs immigrated to British Palestine from Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the late 19th and early 20th century, lured by the prosperity created by returning Jews.
But Gaza? There are over 2 million people in Gaza. There were perhaps 50,000 people there when Arab nations rejected the partition plan in 1947.
For years after that, the Arabs of Gaza lived under Egypt, which used it as a launching site for Fedayeen terrorists into Israel. (Oct. 7 was the culmination of a long tradition.)
Even today, you can hear Gazans talking about how they merely bide their time to return to their homes in Jaffa or elsewhere within Israel proper. The United Nations runs an entire organization devoted wholly to the “Palestine Refugees in the Near East,” even though no such country has ever existed.
How long is a Palestinian considered a refugee in Gaza by the UN? As long as possible.
The UN creates permanent “camps” — in reality, bustling cities — for the descendants of people dislocated by wars that Arabs started over 70 years ago. By contrast, there are over 2 million ethnic Arabs living as citizens in the Jewish state.
OK, then. If Gazans are just refugees, why can’t they move to other Arab nations?
Because they are never going to be able to return to Israel. Convincing them otherwise, as the Western left and others do, only creates a perpetual state of angst and war.
“Our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians, and Palestine is for Palestinians,” the nation’s foreign minister said after Trump’s comments.
Well, the biggest problem with the statement is that it reminds us that Jordan is “Palestine.”
Jordan, with a population of over 70% Palestinians, sits principally on land set aside during the British Palestine Mandate to create a new Arab state that was to sit next to the Jewish one.
We already have a two-state solution. We just choose to ignore it.
But why should Western nations be the only ones compelled to absorb people fleeing Middle East wars?
When Muslims stream into Europe or the United States, it is celebrated as a great moral imperative. Israel is home to Jewish refugees from Asia and Africa and Europe.
Arab nations should partake in this great cause by welcoming back their own people. And Western powers should pressure them into doing the right thing.
Henry Kissinger once noted that Donald Trump, though he may not do it knowingly, was “one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.”
And it is undeniable that many of Trump’s declarations, perhaps because they are unfettered by the norms of policy debate, end up changing the dynamics of policy.
Over the years, through revisionist histories and DC “expertise,” we have been programmed to accept the notion that a Palestinian state is inevitable. It’s not.
There are hundreds of stateless minorities in the world. Most of them have far stronger claims to nationhood.
So proposing that Gazans would be better off in their historic homelands makes perfect sense.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Twitter @davidharsanyi
It’s galling to hear sleazy Democrats like Rep. Jamie Raskin and self-serving government bureaucrats whine about “due process” as Donald Trump sets about cleaning house in the out-of-control administrative state.
Last time Trump was president, he and his appointees were sabotaged and obstructed by Machiavellian Deep-Staters who perverted concepts such as “due process” into protective shields around wrongdoers and turned them into weapons against their adversaries — that is, anyone trying to carry out the wishes of the democratically elected president.
That won’t be happening again. It’s called democracy.
The FBI raided Trump’s home and rummaged through his wife’s underwear drawer. They tried to lock him up and bankrupt him. They rounded up his supporters and advisers and threw them in jail.
He was forced to spend 60% of his time and tens of millions of dollars fighting the lawfare waged against him.
Heads are spinning in Washington at the shock and awe tactics of Trump 2.0. You can hear the panic in the high pitch of Deep State voices as they run squealing to CNN and MSNBC.
An extensive search is underway in the Jerusalem region for Avishai Teitelbaum, aged 24, last seen on 29.01.2025.
The search is centered on prominent religious locations such as synagogues, yeshivot, and the graves of prominent sages.
The Israel Dog Unit, a nonprofit specializing in working dogs that is assisting in the search, has asked the public's help in locating Avishai. He has been missing for several days an is considered in danger.
Any person having any information regarding his whereabouts, or any detail that may assist in locating him, is requested to contact the search hotline at 0544876709.
Arab countries and the Palestinian Authority published a joint statement on Saturday rejecting U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal to relocate Gazans to Egypt and Jordan.
The foreign ministers of those countries and of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates published the statement following a summit meeting in Cairo, according to the Associated Press. The statement also represents the official position of the Arab League, a regional organization with 22 member states, the document said.
“We affirm our rejection of [any attempts] to compromise Palestinians’ unalienable rights, whether through settlement activities, or evictions or [annexations] of land or through vacating the land from its owners … in any form or under any circumstances or justifications,” the statement read.
The move could “threaten the region’s stability, risk expanding the conflict, and undermine prospects for peace and coexistence among its peoples,” the text continued.
Last week, Trump said he had asked Jordan’s King Abdullah II to take in more Palestinians from Gaza, where entire neighborhoods have been destroyed during the 15 months of fighting between Hamas and Israel.
“I said to him that I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One.
“It’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change,” he continued.
He added that he had also asked Egypt to take in Gazans.
The proposal was immediately rejected by Egypt and Jordan, with Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi saying: “Our refusal of displacement is a steadfast position that will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians, and Palestine is for Palestinians.”
Palestinians currently account for more than 70% of the population of Jordan, which is ruled by the Hashemite royal house, whose origins are in the Arabian Peninsula.
🚨🚨 BREAKING : Chuck Schumer is now officially under investigation by the Department of Justice for making threats against conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justices. pic.twitter.com/8nEkIVI9l8
— JOSH DUNLAP (@JDunlap1974) February 1, 2025
Recent developments have heightened tensions between Israel and Egypt, as Israel has formally requested explanations from Egypt regarding a substantial increase in Egyptian military activity within the Sinai Peninsula. In early January of this year, All Israel News reported that according to Channel 14, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have identified significant breaches of the 1979 peace treaty, including the construction of anti-tank barriers, extensive logistical preparations, and the deployment of entire armored divisions in central Sinai.
The 1979 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt mandated the demilitarization of the Sinai Peninsula, a region that Israel returned to Egypt as part of the treaty’s terms. However, the emergence of ISIS as a significant threat in the area led Israel to permit Egypt to amass considerable military forces near their shared border to combat the jihadist insurgency, as was reported by AllIsrael.com in early January. This cooperation was intended to address mutual security concerns without undermining the foundational principles of their peace accord.
The Zachor Legal Institute, in conjunction with Judicial Watch, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the US Department of Education a couple of weeks ago, seeking records related to Doha’s funding and operations at five prestigious American universities: Georgetown, Northwestern, Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Michigan.
The legal action comes in the wake of Texas A&M University's February 2024 decision to shut its Qatar campus, following revelations from a previous lawsuit that uncovered nearly half a billion dollars in funding from the Gulf nation hosting the Hamas leadership to the university.
According to a February 2024 report, Qatar has provided or contracted approximately $6 billion to American universities since 2007.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has appointed Caroline Glick, 46, as his new public relations advisor. Glick, a journalist and publicist, is a senior editor at the Jerusalem Post and the founder of the right-wing satire website Latma. She also worked as an assistant to Netanyahu’s political advisor during his first term in office.
On January 30, Glick posted the final episode of her podcast, “In Focus:”
Glick was born in Houston, and her family relocated to Chicago when she was an infant, where she grew up in the Jewish neighborhood of Hyde Park. She graduated from Columbia College at Columbia University in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science.
During her teenage years, she traveled with her parents and siblings, and it was on one of these trips that she first visited Israel, coinciding with the start of the First Lebanon War. Later that same year, in 1991, Glick made Aliyah and enlisted in the IDF.
In its Israeli Independence Day supplement in 2003, the newspaper Maariv named Glick the most prominent woman in Israel.
In 2003, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Glick was embedded with the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and filed frontline reports for both The Jerusalem Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. She also reported daily from the front lines for Israel’s Channel 1 news. Glick was on the ground when US forces captured the Baghdad International Airport. For her battlefield reporting, she was honored with the Distinguished Civilian Service Award from the US Secretary of the Army.
In 2011, Glick harshly criticized Prime Minister Netanyahu in the aftermath of the Gilad Shalit prisoners’ exchange deal. The piece, which appeared on the News12 website, accused Netanyahu of being a weak leader who gave in to the manipulations of Israel’s extremist and defeatist media. Glick went on to describe Netanyahu as, at best, someone who lacked resolve, and at worst, as an immoral, strategically irresponsible, foolish, and opportunistic politician.
In January 2019, Glick joined Naftali Bennett’s New Right party. She ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the Knesset in the April 2019 elections, securing the sixth spot on the party’s electoral list. None of them made it past the threshold vote in that round.
“Today, I tell my grandchildren not to go down the path of attacks and resistance,” the 69-year-old ex-detainee said in a Friday interview with the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya outlet. “We don’t want our freedom to come at the expense of our children’s’ lives.”
Al-Tous is the oldest terrorist freed so far as part of the Gaza hostage-ceasefire deal.
A member of the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah movement, he was arrested in 1985 for organizing attacks on Israelis in and around Jerusalem. He went on to spend 40 years in prison.
Israeli authorities deported al-Tous to Egypt upon his release in the second round of the exchange, which saw 200 terrorists traded for four female Israeli hostages. He was one of 121 prisoners serving life sentences freed that day.
He was one of the few prisoners detained before the 1993 Oslo Accords not released as part of those agreements.
On Wednesday, al-Tous gave an interview to the Emirati al-Mashhad news outlet, in which he criticized Hamas leadership when asked about the October 7 attack that ultimately led to his release.
“If I had known the cost of my freedom, I would have stayed in prison… A leader who is thinking of carrying out a large attack must be aware of the cost. It is unacceptable that the cost of our release from prison is a drop of blood from a Palestinian child,” he said.
Al-Tous added that he encountered jailed Second Intifada leader Marwan Barghouti multiple times while in prison.
“I met Marwan Barghouti more than once, the last of which was two years ago. He was in good condition,” he told the outlet.
Barghouti, a top figure in Fatah serving five life sentences for planning attacks during the Second Intifada, is envisioned by many Palestinians as a potential successor to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
In another Friday interview with The Independent, al-Tous spoke in favor of political negotiations toward a two-state solution in order to “prevent bloodshed on both sides.”
He urged unity within the Palestinian national movement, calling on Hamas to reconcile with Fatah and accept the leadership of Abbas, now 89 years old.
