The IDF has deployed Israel’s short to mid-range Iron Dome anti-missile defense system in Israel’s “deep south” in the wake of Sunday’s attack on Israel from Gaza. The move could signal concerns over a possible uptick in attacks from the south.

An Iron Dome anti-rocket battery was set up Monday in the city of Sderot, located less than a mile from the Gaza border.

The moves follow the latest rocket attack against Israel by Gaza’s ruling Hamas terrorist organization. A short-range Qassam rocket landed Sunday in a residential section of the city, between two houses.

Miraculously, no one was physically injured in the attack.

Israeli Air Force fighter pilots immediately retaliated in response to the attack, bombing terrorist targets within the enclave and wounding at least five operatives in the process.

By Jonathan Benedek/TPS

The IDF resumed targeting Hamas infrastructure on Sunday night, striking approximately 50 targets in the northern Gaza Strip, after a rocket was fired from Gaza yesterday and landed in a backyard in the nearby Israeli town of Sderot.

“The attack on this terrorist infrastructure is in response to ballistic rocket attacks carried out on the city of Sderot earlier today, which constitutes a threat to the security of Israeli citizens and harms the sovereignty of the State of Israel,” the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said in a statement late last night.

Although a rival Salafist organization operating in the Gaza Strip assumed responsibility for yesterday’s rocket attack, the IDF continued to hold Hamas fully responsible for any rockets launched from Gaza towards Israeli communities.

“The Hamas terrorist organization is the sovereign power in Gaza and it shall be responsible for any terrorist incident perpetrated from there,” the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit added.

Meanwhile, the Hamas terrorist organization held Israel responsible for escalating tensions.

“We hold Israel fully responsible for the escalation in Gaza,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri. “Israel wants to create a new balance of power in the Gaza Strip.”

An IDF official adamantly denied Zuhri’s charge and told reporters that “we have no intention of escalating tensions, and 1,000 aid trucks are entering the Gaza Strip just today alone.”

On Sunday afternoon, a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit the city of Sderot in Israel, no injuries have been reported. In response to the attack, IAF aircraft immediately targeted Hamas positions in the northern Gaza Strip. This was the 14th rocket fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel since the beginning of 2016. But this time, the Israeli response was swift and refreshingly “disproportionate.”

IDF Spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said in a statement: ”The IDF remains committed to the stability of the region and operated in order to bring quiet to the people of southern Israel. When terrorists in Hamas’ Gaza Strip, driven by a radical agenda based on hatred, attack people in the middle of the summer vacation, their intentions are clear- to inflict pain, cause fear and to terrorize.”

According to Ma’an, the IDF fired missiles into the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun on Sunday afternoon and evening, injuring at least five Arabs. Reports of an air raid over Beit Hanoun emerged at around 10:30 PM, with IAF shelling. Earlier in the day, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip announced that a young Arab man in his twenties was injured as a result of an Israeli artillery shelling targeting a military training ground in Beit Hanoun near the Erez crossing. Local sources later told Ma’an that two other Arabs were also injured, though the details remained unclear.

An Israel air force plane was used to strike the first target, while an Israeli army tank was used to attack the second.

Eyewitnesses told Ma’an that a rocket fired by an Israeli drone hit a water reservoir and another shell landed in an open area in Beit Hanoun. The Hamas “Palestinian Information Center” reported that a “Palestinian citizen was injured in the face” by shrapnel of an artillery shell. The report quoted local sources as saying that Israeli tanks fired three shells at an agricultural land in the al-Masriyyin neighborhood in Beit Hanoun. Furthermore, the report said Israeli artillery shells landed in the Filistin training ground which Hamas fighters use for military training.

All of the above were signals from Israel’s new Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman (Yisrael Beiteinu) that the old “proportionate” retaliation policy whereby a volley of rockets from Gaza that fall mostly in empty fields in Israel is met with a lazy IAF attack, several hours later, against terrorist facilities that had been cleared of their inhabitants well in advance — all that is over.

Liberman is changing the rules in Gaza, and it appears that from now on, a provocation, no matter how small, will be met with a fierce and destructive reaction—last night’s attacks hit some 50 targets—that might change the calculus on the other side as well.

One side benefit of the IAF and tank attacks Sunday was that Abu Obeida, the spokesman for Hamas’ military wing who was supposed to give a watershed announcement on his group’s policy, canceled his planned speech for security reasons.

{Originally posted to the author’s eponymous blog}

If something bad happens to Jews or the Jewish state there are some, inexplicably, in British media or politics who cannot pass up the opportunity to use it against the former.

Ex-Liberal Democrat MP felt that the Jews hadn’t learned from the Holocaust. When an Egyptian judoka lost to his Israeli opponent in Rio and promptly refused to shake his hand The Economist used the opportunity to attack Israel as being an “apartheid” state.

Now, after the arrest of World Vision’s Gaza director Mohammad Halabi on allegations of diverting tens of millions of dollars to Hamas Dr Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, secretary general and CEO of CIVICAS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, uses the arrest as an opportunity to attack Israel’s new transparency law.

This new law obligates NGOs that receive more than 50% of their funding from foreign governments or organisations to report where the funding derives from. It doesn’t restrict their activities at all.

In an age of calls for more transparency this can hardly be classed as controversial especially when there are NGOs whose main objective for operating within the Jewish state is merely to destroy it.

But for Sriskandarajah it seems it is controversial. He sees the recent arrests of Halabi and Waheed al Borsh, a UN worker accused of diverting aid resources to help building a jetty for Hamas, as part “of systematic efforts by Israeli authorities to intimidate and undermine civil society”.

As you can see the link Sriskandarajah provides as evidence of such “systematic efforts” is to an article for Al Jazeera by arch anti-Zionist activist Ben White who once wrote “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, yet I can also understand why some are”.

One would think that Sriskandarajah would welcome the investigation into and possible long-term incarceration of anyone convicted of such a heinous crime as diverting funds away from mentally ill and physically disabled patients in Gaza to help the Hamas terror organisation build tunnels into Israel from which to murder innocent Jewish Israelis.

Instead, Sriskandarajah merely sees it as “yet another example of states cracking down on civic space.”

World Vision is one of the DEC charities. DEC advertised widely in the UK for aid for Gazans after Israel’s 2014 war with Hamas. Therefore, the British public has possibly been inadvertently duped out of their hard-earned money in to supporting a terror group instead.

However, The Guardian’s headline to Sriskandarajah’s article “Human rights activists are being portrayed as terrorists and foreign puppets” and using a photo of activists claiming Halabi is “a man of humanity” (see above) suggests total innocence on Halabi’s part.

It is, however, very noble of Sriskandarajah to state that “Israeli government has the right to hold to account any individual or organisation found guilty of corruption.” Halabi and al Borsh will have a chance to state their cases and employ lawyers to defend themselves against the allegations.

We await the outcome of these important criminal investigations, and any more that might arise, with interest and so should Sriskandarajah.

The Israeli Supreme Court on Sunday denied an appeal against the demolition of the Dura village house belonging to one of the terrorists who carried out the drive by shooting that killed Rabbi Miki Mark and injured his wife and children.

The appeal was submitted by The wife of Mohammad Majid Amaira, 38, from Dura, a member of the Palestinian security forces. Amaira was detained for questioning three days after the murder and confessed he was the driver during the attack, while Mohammed Jabarah al-Fakih, 29, also from Dura, fired at the Mark family car.

Amaira’s wife, his daughters and HaMoked, an Israeli NGO assisting PA Arabs in their troubles with the Shabak, filed the appeal jointly.

According to NGO Monitor, Hamoked’s annual budget as of 2014 was $2,617,980, provided by Norway, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Human Rights and International Law Secretariat (jointly fundded by Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands), UNDP (one of whose officials has just been indicted for being a Hamas agent), Finland, CCFD (France), Misereor (Germany), Trocaire (Ireland), Oxfam-Novib (Netherlands), and AECID (Spain).

Rightwing movement Im Tirtzu praised the Supreme Court’s decision to authorize the home demolition, and condemned the “torrent of judicial appeals” submitted by HaMoked on behalf of terrorists.

Im Tirtzu CEO, Matan Peleg, said in an email statement: “Im Tirtzu welcomes the Supreme Court’s decision to authorize the home demolition of the terrorist who murdered Rabbi Miki Mark. This decision sends a clear message to European governments, which fund radical Israeli NGOs to submit appeals to Israel’s Supreme Court aimed at damaging the IDF’s deterrence capabilities.”

Peleg added: “Im Tirtzu will continue leading the fight against this phenomenon. The Israeli public has a right to know who’s defending terrorists.”

Two rocket alerts went off in communities near the Gaza border and in Sderot at around 2:25PM on Sunday.

2:35 PM Residents near the Gaza border are reporting that they heard at least one explosion, possibly two.

2:43 PM Confirmed reports that one rocket from Gaza landed in Sderot between 2 houses. No one was injured.

The rocket was launched from Beit Hanoun.

Police are asking citizens to not go to the area where the rocket fell do the the danger.

3:00 PM Arab sources report that the IDF is striking Beit Hanoun area.

There are no reports on why Iron Dome did not take down he rocket.

A senior official at the Palestinian Authority told Israel Radio Sunday that Israel has refused an offer for a preparatory meeting with the PA side ahead of a possible summit meeting in Cairo between Prime Minister Netanyahu and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

According to the official, the Cairo meeting is intended to prepare for the international peace conference which is being planned in Paris by the end of the year, possibly with representatives from both France and the US. Apparently, various sources have advised Netanyahu to send an envoy to meet with a PA representative to prepare the Cairo meeting, but Netanyahu refused.

“Netanyahu does not want negotiations for a permanent settlement, and as long as he is at the helm there will not be a Palestinian State,” the PA senior said.

The same official also told Israel Radio that the PA does not demand that Israel freeze settlement construction as a prerequisite to the Paris conference, but rather the freeze should coincide with the start of negotiations. He threatened that “should Netanyahu not arrive at the Paris conference, we expect France and the other participating states to recognize the Palestinian State, open Palestinian embassies in their own capitals and boycott the settlements.”

Regarding Defense Minister Liberman’s plan to bypass Abbas in developing communication channels with key people in the PA society, the senior official said Liberman has yet to learn the lesson of the Village Associations that were set up by the late Ariel Sharon as a bulwark against the PLO in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, which eventually became the Hamas movement.

“[Liberman] is treating the Palestinians as if they were animals: if they follow the rules they’ll get food, if not — a kick in the behind. The Village Associations failed then and will fail today. No one will work with Liberman, people here are not traitors,” the official said, adding, “Israel can’t run the same experiment, change nothing and expect different results.”