A 50-year-old man from the Gaza Belt and three others were indicted Monday morning for selling to Hamas materials that the terrorist organization used to build terror tunnels and military compounds.

The indictment stated that the suspects knew that Hamas was going to use the material for terror. The gang included one Arab with Israeli citizenship, a Jew from Tel Aviv and an Arab from the Palestinian Authority.

The resident from the Gaza Belt, identified as Micha Peretz, denied he knew that the material was destined for Hams terrorists. He covered his face when confronted by reporters.

The shocking indictment effectively removed a gag order on the arrests of the gang, which allegedly shipped material to Hamas last year until the Protective Edge campaign.

The suspects were arrested several weeks ago after extensive investigations by the police, the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), customs officers and the IDF. Also arrested were more than two dozen Israeli and Palestinian Authority Arabs.

The materials that Hamas bought from the suspects passed through the Kerem HaShalom. The suspects worked for a large but unnamed company and previously had been warned not to deal with Hamas.

They allegedly sold the terrorist organization thousands of tons of metal, communications and electronic equipment worth tens of millions of dollars. The materials were used to build the same tunnels that terrorists used to kill soldiers and stage attacks on Gaza Belt communities, including where Peretz lives.

Still unanswered is how the material was cleared by Israeli inspectors to pass through the crossing into Gaza, but it is known that gang used a straw company to ship the materials.

The chairman of the Eshkol Regional Council where Peretz lives told Israel Radio Monday morning he was angry and shocked. “If the charges are true, he should not see daylight again,” he said.

He called him a traitor.

An Egyptian court has formally ruled that Gaza’s ruling Hamas organization is a terrorist group, the country’s state-run media reports.

The decision officially outlaws Hamas in much the same way that the Muslim Brotherhood has been banned in Egypt. Hamas was founded by the Brotherhood, as have been many other terrorist organizations as well.

Both the United States and the European Union banned Hamas as a terrorist organization years ago.

Hamas denounced the decision at a news briefing. “It is a shocking and dangerous decision that targets the Palestinian people,” spokesman Fawzi Barhoum told journalists. “It will directly contaminate the reputation of Egypt.”

The same court outlawed as a terrorist group the military wing of Hamas – the Izz a-Din al-Qassam Brigades – last month.

The current ruling came one week after the passage of the country’s Terrorist Entities Law which specifies the designation of a terror group, CNN reported. According to the new law, the prosecutor general must propose the declaration of a group as a terror organization. The decision must be approved by an appeals court as well, according to Ahmed Ragheb, head of the National Group for Human Rights and Law.

In addition, authorities may also freeze the assets of designated terror groups, and issue travel bans as well.

Egypt’s relations with Turkey — another regional neighbor — have been rocky since former Muslim Brotherhood-backed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was deposed in 2013. Turkey’s AKP-led government, headed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is a strong supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Erdogan in particular has long been a close friend of Hamas. Recently Hamas was welcomed to open a new “foreign office” headquarters in the Turkish capital after Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal and his minions were expelled from Qatar.

Since Egypt’s participation in negotiations between Hamas in Gaza and Israel was essential in security a cease-fire during the last war, it remains to be seen how the current situation will affect future relations in the region.

Nahal Oz, Israel, February 24 – Israel Defense Force engineers are working intensively to conceal a series of dams that were opened in order to flood the Gaza Strip with rainwater, aiming to contradict news reports of the induced flooding.

Nearly three battalions of engineers and support troops are laboring around the clock as of yesterday, when Agence France-Presse first reported on the opening of the dams and the consequent deluge of parts of the besieged Gaza Strip. A concurrent deluge of PR efforts also launched to deny the existence of such dams, including hacking Google Earth’s satellite image database to erase evidence of the dams that line the Israeli border with the coastal territory.

The efforts bore partial fruit as AFP and several other outlets retracted the story, but it continues to spread on social media and Arab news organizations that are apparently ignoring the follow-up activity. Mainstream outlets have either issued corrections or removed the links to their stories, but not before human rights activists and other media personalities captured the images and persisted in publicizing the story.

Engineering battalion commander Major Kastahh told a reporter his men had been working in multiple shifts to either dismantle or camouflage the eleven dams that Israel has maintained along the Gaza border for the specific purpose of flooding the territory to make life miserable for the Palestinians there. He said he expected the project to be completed by Wednesday morning, and that eight of the eleven dams would remain useful for the same purpose. The other three would be dismantled, but in the long term the army would replace them with huge, better-concealed pipes with valves that could be opened and closed at will in order to further oppress Gazans yet make it appear that their flood-induced misery had nothing to do with Israel.

“We will continue to blame Hamas for the situation in Gaza,” Kastahh explained. “As long as it remains credible for us to say they should be using metal piping for drainage infrastructure and not for rockets, we see no reason to alter our water-related approach.”

The dams were last opened in 2013, but only seven were in operation at the time. Completion of the remaining four took place under the cover of Operation Protective Edge this past summer. Some of the images circulating online relating to the previous round of flooding have been reused, allowing the Israelis to claim that coverage of the episode has been tainted by slander from the start. Kastahh noted that although it was not his department, his contacts in the units responsible for the media redirection had informed him that it was in fact they, not Palestinians or journalists, who began spreading the older photos, in order to generate credibility for the “slander” angle.

Fortunately for the Palestinians, the intrepid activists of Human Rights Watch ignore Israeli pronouncements, and have therefore not participated in the retraction or “correction” of the various reports.

Originally posted at Jewish Business News

Gazans stranded in Egypt have called on PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the PA ambassador to Egypt Jamal al-Shubaki to appeal to Egyptian authorities to open the Rafah border crossing into the Gaza strip, the Alresalah website reported.

Dozens of Gazan families, have been stuck in the Cairo International Airport for 20 days so far, waiting for the crossing to open, an eyewitness said.

The Egyptian government has accused Gaza’s Hamas rulers of collaboration with the ISIS-related terrorists in the Sinai, which have been clashing with Egyptian forces—hence the closing of the border crossing and the suspension in Egypt of Gazans wishing to return to Gaza.

The stranded passengers are demanding that al-Shubaki intervene, expressing their anger over the silence of the Palestinian Authority embassy in Cairo.

Naturally, the PA embassy is owned and operated by Hamas’ enemies in Ramallah, who are less than eager to make life easier for their nemesis. So the Gazan passengers stay stranded.

The sane Gazan passengers have also “expressed their trust in Egypt’s President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi,” and “praise his role in supporting the Palestinian people and their just Cause,” Alresalah reported.

Because, let’s face it, they’re in al-Sisi’s dog house right now, so they must behave.

Mortar fire awakened southern Israeli residents just a few hundred meters from the Gaza border on Monday night.

Two mortar shells were reportedly fired from the southern Gaza city of Rafah and exploded within the borders of the region run by the Hamas terror organization.

The motive and identity of the group behind the shell fire was not known.

The Navy and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) intercepted a boat last January that was on its way to Gaza with materials for manufacturing rockets and mortar shells, according to military spokesmen after a gag order on the counter-terrorist operation was lifted on Wednesday.

The vessel was being used to smuggle liquid fiberglass for building weapons to be launched on Israel. The boat was sailing from off the Sinai Peninsula to a Gaza port. Israel has placed a maritime embargo on Hamas-controlled Gaza to prevent the smuggling of weapons and materials for weapons.

Security officials arrested three Arabs who confessed to planning to smuggle the liquid fiberglass for Hamas.

The three suspects were identified as Machmed Bechar, Ahmed Zaidi and Awad Zaidi.

​They gave investigators detailed information on previous weapon smuggling activities and told them how Hamas intended to utilize fisherman and smugglers for future smuggling attempts.

That explains why the Navy often fires on those supposedly innocent “fishing boats” that foreign media report were manned by poor Gaza Arabs who can’t make a decent living fishing because the big bad Israeli Navy thinks fishermen are enemies.

They are enemies because they are not fishermen. They are terrorists.

The gag order on the operation was lifted when the men were indicted in a Be’er Sheva court today for involvement in crimes endangering the security of the country.

“The IDF is determined to prevent unlawful attempts to ship weapons and raw materials that may jeopardize the well being of Israelis,” said Lt. Colonel Peter Lerner, IDF Spokesman. “This shipment highlights that when Hamas chose to smuggle materials for rockets and mortars, it chose not to invest in the rehabilitation for the people of Gaza.”​​

Terrorists from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) operating in Gaza have united with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah faction to silence Palestinian journalists, Arab affairs journalist Khaled Abu Toameh writes in an article for the Gatestone Institute.

Over the past few days, a number of Palestinian journalists have received death threats from the “Gaza branch” of ISIS and were accused of publishing “lies” about ISIS in particular and about Islam in general.

The threats were sent via social media and messages to the journalists’ mobile phones.

“Islamic State warns the journalist and media people against their continued and constant attacks on us,” reads the text of one message sent. “We in Islamic State affirm that we will execute the rule of the Shari’a [Islamic law] against these apostates, who are sowing discord among Muslims.”

Many Palestinian journalists were already being targeted by Hamas in Gaza and the PA in Judea and Samaria. Those threats were reported last summer and confirmed by international journalists after they once they escaped from Gaza and reached their home countries, where they were free from the danger of being killed by Hamas and its terrorist allies.

The latest threats have only ratcheted up the pressure on these reporters, who are taking the threats seriously and are increasing their vigilance and their self-censorship.

“Of course we are afraid,” a veteran journalist in Gaza told Toameh. “You never know who is hiding behind the mask. It could be someone from ISIS or Hamas or Islamic Jihad or even Fatah. It is not safe to be a journalist living in the West Bank or Gaza.”

“The threats against Palestinian journalists are important because this is no longer a ‘local’ issue or an internal Palestinian affair,” Toameh writes. “Those who are seeking to silence the Palestinian journalists are also trying to prevent the international media from learning about what is really happening in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“A Palestinian journalist working with international news agencies and newspapers is not going to report truthfully and honestly, when he or she is facing daily threats from so many parties. The only stories these journalists are going to offer the international media are ones that depict Israel in a negative manner. The Palestinian journalists know that at the end of the day they need to go back to their families in Ramallah and Gaza without having to worry about masked men knocking on their doors at night.

“The threats against Palestinian journalists are worrying, and should be exposed and brought to the attention of human rights groups around the world. More disturbing is that many of the international journalists operating in the region are willing to turn a blind eye to the dangers facing their Palestinian colleagues and employees. The international media outlets and their representatives are prepared to take almost any story offered to them by Palestinian reporters, especially if the story consists of anti-Israel statements,” Toameh writes.

The above is especially important to consider in light of the current investigation into last summer’s Operation Protective Edge, being carried out by the United Nations Human Rights Council. As they did with depositions taken for the notorious and inaccurate Goldstone Report, the investigators are taking at face value anything said to them by Gaza residents they interview. They fail to understand the nature of the threat under which the average citizen lives his or her life in Gaza – nor do most “outsiders” realize how many so-called “civilians” are ancillary members or supporters of terror groups as well.

As a result, the evidence gathered is skewed from the start, though the investigators are wholly unaware of it, or worse, could care less.

International media by and large relies on news reports that have been self-censored by on-the-scene Palestinian stringers who are frankly afraid for their lives.
Threats by ISIS will now only raise the heat in the area.