Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has approved allowing the entry of  570 truckloads of construction materials, electrical equipment, telecommunications and plumbing materials into Hamas-controlled Gaza for construction of a Turkish hospital on the ruins of the destroyed Jewish community of Netzarim.

Turkey initiated the project three years ago without any coordination with Israel at a time when both countries’ relations were in the deep freeze.

The government of Prime Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who keeps a door open to Iran by embracing the Hamas terrorist government, had no problem in getting around Israel’s restrictions on “dual-use” equipment that also is used to build rockets and factories for weapons used to attack Israel. It simply used tunnels to smuggle equipment for  the 160-bed complex that is to cover 34 acres.

Ya’alon’s announcement came a day after  the Turkish deputy prime minister was quoted as saying that Israel is about to sign on the dotted line to pay millions of dollars to families of terrorists who tried to kill Israeli Navy commandos in the clash on the Mavi Mamara ship four years ago.

It is nice to know that Hamas finally is using the ruins of Gush Katif communities for something other than terrorist training camps. It needs a hospital to care for terrorists who are wounded by Israeli soldiers when they attack Israel with rockets or try to blow up Israeli soldiers at the security fence.

The Israeli government did not ask former residents of Netzarim for permission to bless Turkey’s grand humanitarian gesture.

If there is one place in the world that it is difficult for even President Shimon Peres to think that there will be peace, it is Gaza. Peres was his usual smug self with his head in the clouds when he assured everyone that expelling Jews and withdrawing Israel’s military eyes and ears from Gaza would bring peace and quiet.

After Hamas attacked Ashkelon, and then Ashdod, and Rehovot, the same Shimon Peres as President of the State of Israel, made a fool of himself by saying, in public no less – and this is a paraphrase but very close to the original quote –  “ I can’t understand why Hamas would so such a thing after all that we did for peace.”

The number of Israelis who trust Hamas is close to zero. The more Mahmoud Abbas and the entire Palestinian Authority regime proves to even Israel’s bleeding heart media that the Arabs have no interest in peace with Israel, the more the expulsion wrenches the stomach.

Hamas needs the hospital for Gaza civilians, many of whom have no problem hating Israel while at the same time begging for medical care at Israel’s hospitals. Some of the patients even change their minds after  medical care and realize that Jews actually are human beings and  not apes and pigs depicted by  Muslims preachers.

The idea of a hospital sounds great, but as awful as it is to think, hate is hate and it is a two-way street. Here is the response of one former Netzarim resident to The Jewish Press: “When the hospital is full, it should be blown up.”

That could be the ugly end to this ugly story, but a look at the reasons for the Israeli government’s second marriage with Turkey makes this article even uglier.

Turkey and Israel were great friends for years, carrying out joint military exercises and enjoying a healthy flow of goods and merchandise in two directions. Tens of thousands of Israel tourists flocked to Turkey’s resorts.

All of that changed when Erdogan got on his high horse during the Operation Cast Lead counter-terrorist campaign more than five years ago.

The Israeli Navy Wednesday morning thwarted an attempt to smuggle what may have been explosives form Egypt into Gaza.

After two “fishing” boats encroached on international waters and refused orders from the Navy to stop, soldiers opened fire and hit the vessels, setting off secondary explosions. Two Arabs suffered light to moderate wounds.

Arab sources in Gaza said that the boat was loaded with cigarettes and tobacco.

The explosions indicate that the fire hit the engine room or that the cigarettes were of special varieties that blow up when lit.

Or perhaps, just maybe, the “tobacco” was a load of explosives and ammunition.

An Ontario court has ordered the seizure of more than $7 million in assets belonging to Iran to compensate American victims of terror.

The historic ruling last week brought to an end several lawsuits filed in Canada by terror victims from the United States seeking damages from Iran for training, arming and financing the Hamas and Hezbollah terror groups.

The Americans previously were awarded damages by U.S. courts but could not collect from any Iranian government assets in the United States. They came to Canada for enforcement, which was made possible by Ottawa’s passage in 2012 of the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act. The law strips state immunity in civil lawsuits from countries deemed to be “supporting terrorism.”

The Ontario court ordered sheriffs to seize one bank account worth $1.47 million controlled by an Iranian diplomat, and another with a balance of $511,000 controlled by Iran’s charge d’affaires in Ottawa.

The evidence “overwhelmingly” established that the money in the accounts was the property of Iran, the judge ruled.

Also to be sold, with the proceeds going to the victims, are a building in Toronto valued at $1.1 million and another in Ottawa valued at $3.9 million. Both facilities operated as ostensible cultural centers. The judge noted there was evidence that the Ottawa property was owned by a front group linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which is “hardly a cultural or charitable organization.”

The plaintiffs in the case, believed to be the first of its kind in Canada, were Edward Tracy and the family of Joseph Cicippio. Both U.S. men were captured and held hostage in Beirut from 1986 to 1991.

“I’m surprised. I’m shocked that we’ve gotten this far after all these years,” Cicippio told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Cicippio’s family was awarded $91 million in damages in 2005 but could not collect in the United States. Tracy won a judgment of $18.5 million in 2003.

It is expected that other victims of terror in separate cases, including a Canadian dentist wounded in a 1997 Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem, and three other American families will share in the proceeds as part of a side deal worked out among lawyers.

The other Americans suing in Canada were Alann Steen, who was abducted in Beirut in 1987 and held for nearly five years; the family of David Jacobsen, who was kidnapped in 1985 and released 17 months later; and the family of Marla Bennett, a California student killed in a 2002 bombing attack by Hamas at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

All won sizable awards in U.S. courts but could not collect.

Over the weekend, Iran’s state-controlled media blasted the Canadian ruling as “politically motivated” and of “no legal value.” No representative of the country attended the court hearing.

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the security forces that took part in an operation in Jenin to arrest a Hamas terrorist, which left the suspect and at least two others dead.

“Our policy is to attack those who attack us and who are planning to attack us. Both were applicable in this case,” Netanyahu said Sunday at the beginning of the regular weekly Cabinet meeting.

The suspected terrorist was identified by the Israel Defense Forces as Hamza Abu Alhija, who was wanted for involvement in shooting and bombing attacks as well as planning future terror attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers, the IDF said in a statement.

During the early Saturday morning raid, forces from the Police Special Anti-Terror Unit, the IDF and the Shin Bet security service tried to arrest Abu Alhija, who barricaded himself in his home with other Hamas operatives, according to the IDF.

Abu Alhija then opened fire at the Israeli forces, wounding two security personnel, and then attempted to escape while continuing to shoot. The security forces responded with live gunfire, killing him.

During a riot that erupted at the scene, during which Palestinians from Jenin threw rocks, fire bombs, and explosives at the Israeli forces, the Israeli troops responded with live fire, killing at least two other Arabs, identified as belonging to Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aksa Martyrs’ Brigades, the military wing of the ruling Fatah Party.

Two Israeli security forces were injured in the incident.

Three Palestinian terrorist groups – Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aksa Martyrs’ Brigades – issued a joint statement warning that they will take revenge on Israel and the Palestinian Authority for the deaths.

“The resistance in the West Bank is alive and won’t die, and the Zionist enemy can’t guess from where the resistance will attack. The blood of Jenin Martyrs won’t go in vain,” the groups said in a statement, according to the Times of Israel.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ office condemned the incident, and called it an “escalation” by Israel. The statement also called on the United States to get involved before the teetering peace negotiations are completely “ruined.”

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The positions of the Palestinian Arabs in the latest round of peace talks, being pushed by Obama Administration and Secretary of State John Kerry, and the concessions being expected of Israel by the U.S. and media, will most certainly lead to a failure.

In the parallel universe in which Israeli-Palestinian Arab peace negotiations take place, the Palestinian Authority’s outright abrogation of prior agreements (Oslo Accords) and rejections of prior proposals (Camp David 2000 and 2008), which were pretexts for engaging in a terrorism war, the intifadah, must be placed back on the table as the starting point for the next round.

In every other situation throughout the world, when two parties are negotiating for something, there is the expectation of compromise, recognition and respect for the other side. Yet, none exists on the Palestinian-Arab side, nor do the media hold them to account. Is there no price to pay for intransigence and rejection? Or defeat in war?

Moreover, the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has a limited and questionable authority: his term as president expired five years ago, and he only “rules” the West Bank/Judea-Samaria. The Gaza Strip is under the thumb of Hamas: an elected terrorist Islamic resistance movement, whose genocidal intentions against Jews and Israel are evident and proudly displayed.

There is no proof that even if Abbas signs an agreement, it will be honored by Hamas, let alone that it will be binding on the PA.  This is blithely disregarded by the media.

Yet, it is Israel that is held to impossible standards by the media.

Even the venerable Wall Street Journal labeled the recently passed Knesset law requiring any ceding of territory to Palestinian Arabs in a future peace deal to be approved in a public referendum as “yet another hurdle to the U.S-backed peace efforts to achieve a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians.”

But why in the world doesn’t Israel, a sovereign, democratic nation, have the absolute right to bring such a momentous decision and choice to its own people in exchange for an elusive piece of paper peace?

Israel’s Security Needs Minimized

The international media have been willing to blame Israeli “settlements” – even on land that has been under Israeli control since their capture in the defensive war of 1967, and per the Oslo Agreements of 1993; and “restrictive security practices” in PA controlled areas (i.e. checkpoints); and even the Israeli-built security barrier, which has prevented innumerable terrorist attacks and saved countless lives on both sides- as the biggest obstacles to Middle East peace.

What is rarely ever discussed are Israel’s strong rights to the land, both historic and legal.  Israel has recently begun to redress this by its issuance of the Levy Report, which unfortunately has not yet been formally adopted by the government.

The late Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor Party, was considered by many in his time a pro-peace leader. Like the authors of U.N. Security Council’s Resolution 242, he recognized that Israel’s pre-1967 armistice lines left the nation too vulnerable to future aggression.

Rabin insisted Israel must hold onto a significant portion of the “West Bank” to block traditional Arab invasion routes from the east and to protect both Jerusalem and the low-lying coastal plain, home to more than 70% of the nation’s population.

In his last speech in the Knesset before his assassination in 1995, Rabin declared, “The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six-Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that the government “has turned the Negev and Be’er Sheva into the cyber capital of the Eastern Hemisphere” and that “there will no trickle of rockets.”

Every prime minister for the past 20 years has promised Jews in Gaza, before they were expelled, and residents in the Western Negev, that Israel will not tolerate missile fire from Gaza.

Those promises were worth about as much as the commitment of Ariel Sharon when he encouraged Jews to live in Gush Katif and as much as the intellectual dishonesty of the Labor governments that offered incentives to Jews to live in the same communities in Judea and Samaria that they now want to dismantle.

After the expulsion of Jews from Gaza in 2005, the Palestinian Authority, then under the aegis of Mahmoud Abbas and later under the current Hamas regime, relentlessly pounded Sderot and Netivot with missiles. They developed longer-range rockets to hit Ashkelon, and then Ashdod, both of them key port cities where a single missile blast at the wrong place could blow up strategic  infrastructure, such as the electric generating, fuel depots and gas lines. Defense ministers talked, and terrorists fired. When the missiles stated hitting the area of Rehovot and Rishon LeTzion, cities that are part of metropolitan Tel Aviv, the government ordered the IDF not only to put an end to the attacks but also changed its policy and started retaliating for every rocket attack.

It is a sad fact that the government really does not care that much about the towns of Sederot, Netivot and surrounding rural areas. The votes are in metorpolitcan Tel Aviv, the home of most Israeli factories and offices and the homes of the power brokers, the people who really run Israel.

Tel Aviv is running out of room, Home prices are out of reach of the average family, and the Olmert and Netanyahu administrations made strategic decisions to invest in the wide open Negev, whose “capital” is Be’er Sheva, for decades an ignored outpost for Moroccan Jews and academics who learn and teach at Ben Gurion University.

A revolution is taking place in Israel, and it is in the Negev. A new high-tech park, with international investment, was launched earlier this year. The north-south Highway 6 high-speed highway is being extended to the outskirts of Be’er Sheva.

The IDF is in the process of moving bases, especially Air Force bases, from the Tel Aviv area to the Negev.

“We are in the midst of a revolution that is turning the Negev into a thriving center, not a periphery or branch, into a bustling center of Israel,” Netanyahu said Tuesday.

His last line, that “my policy is clear; any firing of rockets will be met with an immediate and sharp response,” was ostensibly irrelevant to the subject of development, but in fact it was part and parcel of the new Negev.

Israel now has a vested interest in the Negev, and it cannot afford even one rocket attack no more than it can allow rocket firing on Ben Gurion Airport.

It is not a very nice message to the pioneers of kibbutzim, moshavim and development towns in the Negev, but the truth is that the Iron Dome anti-missile system is just a Band-Aid.

The developing the Negev as the Cyber Capital of the Eastern Hemisphere is guaranteeing southern Israel peace and quiet.

The Israel Defense Forces called up a limited number of reservists following a second day of rocket attacks from Gaza on southern Israel.

The reservists — for air defense, according to the Israel Defense Forces — were summoned on Thursday, when 17 more rockets were fired at Israel. Seven landed in Israel and two were intercepted by the Iron Dome system. The remainder hit Palestinian areas. Another rocket struck southern Israel after the announcement was made but caused no damage.

At least seven rockets were fired at southern Israel shortly after the Islamic Jihad terrorist group in Gaza said it would abide by the cease-fire mediated by Egypt in 2012 amid an Israeli operation to stop rocket attacks.

Four rockets were fired Thursday morning at Ashkelon and Ashdod, with two landing in open fields between the cities and one intercepted over Ashkelon by Iron Dome. Ashdod closed schools without rocket-proof shelters following attacks.

Hours later, Israel’s Air Force retaliated by targeting seven “terror sites” in the southern Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement Thursday afternoon.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would continue to respond militarily to the attacks.

“Our policy in the South is clear — we attack anyone who attempts to hurt us and we will react with a powerful force,” Netanyahu said Thursday morning. “I want to clarify that whoever tries to hurt our Purim celebrations, we will respond with force.” Purim begins on Saturday evening.

Israel’s security Cabinet met Thursday morning to discuss the escalation in attacks from Gaza.

The previous evening, Islamic Jihad fired dozens of rockets at southern Israel, with 41 landing in Israeli territory, including five in residential neighborhoods. Iron Dome shot down at least three of the rockets. The IDF responded by hitting what it called in a statement 29 “terror locations” in Gaza with artillery fire. Israeli residents were instructed to remain within 15 seconds of a bomb shelter overnight. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attacks and urged restraint from all sides. The U.S. State Department in its condemnation of the attacks said Israel has a right to defend itself.

Wednesday’s attack was the largest on Israel since the 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense, the IDF said.

The Israeli Air Force bombed seven terror targets, four in southern Gaza and three in the north around midnight Thursday after Gaza terrorists ignored the Islamic Jihad’s ceasefire announcement.

Eight short-range exploded in southern Israel between noon and night, and additional eight rockets missed their targets and landed in Gaza., causing damage to a home, IDF Spokesman Peter Lerner said in a statement after midnight. The Iron Dome intercepted two of the missiles aimed at Israeli civilians.

“Civilians in southern Israel face an unbearable reality, a reality the IDF will not allow to become routine,” Lerner said, “We will continue to retaliate to the aggression emanating from the Hamas run Gaza Strip. Militants attacking Israel from the Gaza Strip will not feel safe, will pay the price and will find that their actions are futile.”

Islamic Jihad claimed that it did not fore any of the rockets after it announced that Egypt had brokered a ceasefire. Israel denied it was part of any agreement, but Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said “quiet would be met with quiet.” He also said that rocket fire will be met with rocket fire.

It was apparent that both Islamic and Israel were interested in putting an end to the latest round of attacks and retaliations, but there are dozens of minor terrorist organizations in Gaza who always are interested in throwing their weight around.

The ceasefire that is not a ceasefire still may come into existence in the next couple of days if Hamas sees it has nothing to gain by an all-out Israeli attack and if it has the capability or controlling smaller terror gangs.

Hamas has little room to maneuver. Having been isolated by Hamas, its only real allies are Hezbollah and Iran.

The only thing it might gain from continued conflict with Israel is breaking up the  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace talk show, but Kerry so far has displayed amazing talents at doing that without any outside help.