Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — Israel’s United Nations Ambassador Danny Danon on Thursday morning responded to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ call for a halt to IDF activity in Judea and Samaria. “Since Oct. 7, Iran has been working vigorously to introduce into Judea and Samaria sophisticated explosive devices that are intended to detonate in the centers of Israeli cities,” Danon tweeted. “The State of Israel cannot sit idly by and wait for the spectacle of buses and cafes exploding in city centers. The activity of the IDF forces in Judea and Samaria is...
(JTA) — The United States announced sanctions against a nonprofit that has received funding from the Israeli government as well as the civilian security chief of a West Bank settlement. The sanctions are the United States’ latest effort to curb extremism among settlers and come as violence in the West Bank has escalated. The nonprofit, Hashomer Yosh, was founded a decade ago with the stated mission of supporting and protecting farms in Israeli West Bank settlements. In its announcement of sanctions, the State Department accused the non...
(JNS) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Wednesday that the major flare-up with Hezbollah earlier this week wasn't "the end of the story." During a tour of the country's northern border, Netanyahu said, "[On Sunday], we foiled a surprise attack by Hezbollah against the State of Israel. We destroyed thousands of intermediate-range rockets that were aimed at the Galilee and the Golan Heights. We thwarted all of the drones that were directed against the State of Israel, at...
(JNS) - Nearly 30,000 new immigrants have arrived in Israel since the Oct. 7 massacre, according to figures released Tuesday by the World Zionist Organization. The wave of aliyah coincides with the nearly 11-month war against Hamas in Gaza and a surge in global antisemitism, including in North America. The war began when thousands of Hamas terrorists infiltrated southern Israel, slaughtering 1,200 people and abducting another 250. Of these, 109 still remain captive in the Strip. "On Oct. 7, a war erupted not against the state of Israel but agai...
(JTA) — Israel bombed hundreds of sites inside Lebanon and Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into Israel early Sunday in a sharp flare of hostilities at Israel’s northern border. Hezbollah has said for weeks that it is planning a significant attack within Israel in response to Israel’s killing in Beirut last month of Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander. Israeli military leaders said they had determined that an attack was imminent and struck against Hezbollah’s rocket launchers in a bid to prevent or blunt the damage. They said that a fleet o...
(JNS) - MAGHAR, Israel - After seven months fighting Hamas terrorists in Gaza with his elite military reserve unit, 32-year-old Eyal Ghanam is now heading to the country's volatile northern border for a two-month stint. For Ghanam, a member of Israel's small and strongly patriotic Druze community, military service runs deep in the family; his father's 25-year Israel Defense Forces career saw him rise to become infantry brigade commander of the northern Gaza Strip before Israel's unilateral...
(JNS) - The secrets of the Jewish kitchen dating back two millennia to the time of the Biblical Second Temple are being uncovered in Jerusalem's ancient drainage channel, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced on Tuesday. Items such as expensive oils, grape seeds and 2,000-year-old eggshells were unearthed during an excavation-outside the Old City walls-in the drainage channel that ran under Jerusalem's main street during the Second Temple period. The ancient drainage channel ran under the...
(JNS) — HAIFA—The rows of hospital beds with adjacent oxygen units line the underground parking lot. Four operating rooms, a maternity ward and a dialysis center are among the facilities that Haifa’s Rambam Health Care Campus, aka Rambam Medical Center, has set up three levels down in its parking garage. The largest hospital in northern Israel has created the biggest underground hospital in the world, and is gearing up for what could be an all-out war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The three-floor, $140 million Sammy Ofer Fortified Under...
(Israel Hayom via JNS) — Bullet fragments were discovered in at least some of the corpses of six Israeli hostages retrieved from Khan Yunis in Gaza last week, according to information shared with their families. This finding lends credence to the theory that some hostages were killed by their captors shortly before an aerial assault that preceded Monday’s IDF and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) rescue operation. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called it a “daring and dangerous operation in the Hamas tunnels in Khan Yunis.” Haim Peri, Y...
(JNS) — The Israel Defense Forces recovered the bodies of six hostages kidnapped on Oct. 7 and murdered in captivity from a tunnel in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday morning. In an operation involving the IDF and Israel Security Agency, the bodies of Avraham Munder, Yoram Metzger, Nadav Popwell, Yagev Buchstat, Alex Dancyg and Haim Perry were located after over 10 months in captivity. The total number of hostages remaining in the hands of Hamas in Gaza now stands at 109. M...
(JNS) — Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared on Aug. 21during a visit to the Gaza-Egypt border that the IDF has achieved victory over Hamas’s Rafah brigade. “I came here first and foremost to express my appreciation [to the soldiers]. The Rafah brigade was defeated by the IDF’s Division 162,” Gallant said at the Philadelphi Corridor, the 9.7-mile-long buffer zone captured by Israeli forces in May. Since taking control of the area, the IDF has located and destroyed 150 terror tunnels, and Gallant instructed the forces to finish th...
(JNS) - When we discuss Israel's history, we often speak in terms of geography: the partition plan, the 1948 border, the pre-1967 armistice lines, the post-1967 borders and the post-1973 boundaries. Now, we must add the pre- and post-2023 borders. The major difference is that instead of expanding the size of the Jewish state, it has shrunk since Oct. 7 because of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's failure to protect northern Israel. For roughly a decade, he avoided direct confrontation...
(JNS) — An Iranian attack on the Jewish state “could be this week,” but U.S. President Joe Biden “is confident that we have the capability available to us to help defend Israel should it come to that,” John Kirby, the White House national security communications advisor, told reporters on Monday. The White House shares Israel’s “same concerns and expectations” about the potential timing of Iran’s reaction to the July 31 assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a heavily-guarded Tehran guest house complex. Israel has neithe...
(JNS) — The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense, notified Congress on Tuesday that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had approved five potential sales to Israel—collectively worth up to $20.3 billion—of tactical vehicles, mortar and tank cartridges, missiles and F-15 fighter jets. The sale of F-15IA and F-15I+ aircraft “and related equipment” costs up to $18.82 billion, according to the agency. Israel has requested to buy 50 new F-15IA jets, which are made by Boeing, the agency said. “The United Stat...
(JNS) — The Israel Defense Forces said on Monday night that it was investigating a claim made by Hamas that a hostage was executed and two others wounded in separate incidents in Gaza. Al Qassam Brigades spokesman Hudayfa Samir Abdallah al-Kahlout, known by the alias Abu Obeida, published a statement on Telegram on Monday claiming that one Israeli male captive had been executed and two female abductees seriously wounded by their Hamas captors. “In two separate incidents, two [Hamas] soldiers assigned to guard enemy prisoners fired at a Zio...
(JNS) - Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday that the current negotiations could be Israel's last chance to secure the return the remaining hostages captured by Hamas on Oct. 7. Speaking ahead of meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog in Tel Aviv, Blinken said, "This is a decisive moment, probably the best, maybe the last opportunity to get the hostages home, to get a ceasefire, and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security." "I'm here as part of an intensive diplomatic effor...
(JTA) - Hundreds of mourners gathered in Rishon Lezion, Israel, Tuesday night for the funeral of Jordan Cooper, 26, an American-born "lone soldier" who had died the day before from a severe allergic reaction. His parents, Marla Covin Cooper and Ross Cooper, younger brother Ethan and grandfather Jerry were visiting him in Israel when he died, and ahead of his funeral a request went out to the public saying that they were inviting members of the public to "come and accompany him on his final...
(JNS) — U.S., Egyptian and Qatari leaders released a statement on Thursday calling jointly for an immediate conclusion to talks between Israel and Hamas about a ceasefire and hostage release agreement. “It is time to bring immediate relief both to the long-suffering people of Gaza as well as the long-suffering hostages and their families,” the three stated. “The time has come to conclude the ceasefire and hostages and detainees release deal.” The statement, signed by U.S. President Joe Biden, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Qatari E...
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apologized for the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas in which more than 1,200 Israelis were killed and more than 250 were taken hostage. “I am sorry, deeply, that something like this happened,” he told Time Magazine during an hourlong interview this week in Jerusalem. The interview, which Time published in full, was Netanyahu’s first major one with any news organization since Oct. 7. Eric Cortellessa, Time’s national political correspondent, interviewed the prime minister shortly after his visit to...
(JNS) — “Hezbollah and Iran have taken you, the residents of Lebanon, as their hostages.” This was the message Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant sent to the Land of the Cedars on Thursday. Gallant, a former IDF major-general, published the message in Arabic, saying, “Hezbollah and Iran have taken you as hostages for their narrow interests. If Hezbollah does not cease its aggression in the north, Israel will enter into a harsh war.” The minister in his missive called the 2006 Second Lebanon War an “adventure” that Hezbollah undertook. Be...
(JNS) - A medical opinion submitted in the case of the Hamas terrorist who was allegedly raped at the Israel Defense Forces' Sde Teiman detention center suggests that the IDF reservists suspected of attacking him could be innocent, Israel's Channel 14 News broadcaster reported on Thursday. The expert opinion-written by Professor Alon Pikarsky, director of general surgery at Jerusalem's Hadassah-University Medical Center and a board-certified general surgeon specializing in colorectal...
(Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. via JNS) — On May 15, 2024, the Israel Defense Forces announced that a Hezbollah drone had hit the Israeli Air Force facility that operated the “Sky Dew” High Availability Aerostat System. This strike was unusual in that it took place far from the Israel-Lebanon front. It drew Israel’s attention, and not only because it represented a gradual escalation in the reaction equation. The fact that the aircraft accurately hit its target was not, in itself, the worst aspect of the incident. Hezboll...
(JNS) — With the assassinations of Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Mohammed Deif in Gaza, along with Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr in Lebanon, coupled with a major strike on the Houthis’ oil refineries in Yemen, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has clearly decided to escalate towards actually winning the war against Iran and its terror proxies. The timing is important. First, Israel has largely completed its intensive operations in Gaza, severely diminishing Hamas’s capacities and punishing the Palestinians living there for supportin...
(JNS) — The Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization in Lebanon resumed its attacks on northern Israel late Thursday night, firing a large volley of rockets at civilian communities in the Jewish state’s Western Galilee. The rocket assault ended a 48-hour lull that followed Tuesday’s Israeli airstrike in Beirut in which Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s No. 2, was killed. Air-raid sirens were activated in Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra, Hanita, Shlomi, Matzuva, Liman, Betzet, Shlomi, Snir and the Achziv Miluot industrial zone, according to the Israel Defense...
(JNS) - MAJDAL SHAMS, Israel - The pictures of 12 smiling children line the shattered gate of a soccer field, above wreaths of flowers. The blackened remains of bicycles lie next to the bomb shelter the boys and girls were rushing to after a siren went off during their weekend game in this windswept Druze village in the Golan Heights. "Donated with love for the safety of the People of Israel," reads a sign on the shelter, pockmarked by the shrapnel from the Iranian-made Hezbollah rocket that...
