The Israeli Air Force almost immediately retaliated to Wednesday night’s multiple rocket attacks on Israel and scored direct hits on an underground rocket launcher, a weapons storage facility and a factory manufacturing weapons.

The Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepted the rockets from Gaza before they could hit their targets in Ashkelon, approximately 5 miles from northern Gaza.

“The IDF response was precise, swift and efficient in eliminating terror capabilities that only exist in order to terrorize, kill and maim Israelis,” said IDF Spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner.

The video below shows how it was done.

Israel’s Supreme Court has given Justice Minister Tzipi Livni one week to respond to a lawsuit by an Israeli NGO representing victims of Palestinian terror victims in a case against the Bank of China.

On Tuesday, the court put its time mandate on Livni hours after the Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center filed a suit requesting information issued by the New York District Court under the Hague Convention on the Taking of Evidence Abroad in Civil or Commercial Matters.

In November, the Israeli government filed a petition with the U.S. federal court seeking to block the testimony of former Israeli intelligence official Uzi Shaya, saying he would divulge state secrets.

Shaya, according to reports, in 2005 alerted Chinese security officials to suspicious transactions, including transfers of money to terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Some 22 families of victims of Palestinian suicide bombers who brought the suit accuse the Bank of China of funding terrorist organizations through U.S. accounts. They are seeking millions of dollars in damages; a guilty verdict under anti-terrorism laws also could affect the bank’s ability to continue conducting business in the United States.

The families, through Shurat HaDin director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, requested specific documents from the justice minister last June as well as the testimony of Shaya. No response or documents have been forthcoming, according to Shurat HaDin

“We have filed this suit today as we believe Minister Livni is culpable not only of failing in her duties under the Hague Convention, but of failing the Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism in their quest for justice,” Darshan-Leitner said in a statement Tuesday.

A similar case against the bank was brought by the family of American student Daniel Wultz, who was killed in a 2006 terror attack in Tel Aviv.

After crushing the Muslim Brotherhood at home, Egypt’s military rulers are going after Hamas in the Gaza Strip, senior Egyptian security officials told Reuters on Tuesday. Now they go about toppling Hamas, which took over in Gaza in 2007.

Last month, Egypt’s public prosecutor accused Hamas of conspiring with the Brotherhood and Iran to launch terrorist attacks in Egypt.

“We know Hamas is the Brotherhood and the Brotherhood are terrorists and no country could develop with terrorists in or around it,” the security official said.

Wait – is anybody writing this down? Someone should tell Bibi that the Egyptians have finished reading his book and are now busy applying his ideas. The good ones, before he turned his back on them.

Since rising to power in a military coup in the summer, the Egyptian junta has been laboring to undermine Gaza’s economy by destroying the bulk of the 1,200 tunnels used to smuggle food, cars and weapons. In that area, too, Egypt has been a lot more heavy handed than the IDF. Essentially, using a team of bulldozers, the Egyptian army, over a period of ten days or so, razed everything that stood up alongside the Gaza border up to where the Israeli border begins. They created a broad no man’s land over the caved in tunnels, making passage into their side a life threatening proposition.

Egypt’s Junta has cracked down hard on the Brotherhood, to the point where nowadays almost its entire leadership and thousands of its rank and file members are behind bars.

And so, today, while Egyptians continue to vote on the first day of polling in the constitution referendum – their junta’s first electoral test since Mohamed Morsi’s ouster in July; and while as many as nine Egyptians have already been killed in local clashes, the new Pharaohs are setting their sights on another target.

“Gaza is next,” one senior security official told Reuters. “We cannot get liberated from the terrorism of the Brotherhood in Egypt without ending it in Gaza, which lies on our borders.”

It looks like Hamas will be facing growing resistance and street protests, much like those that took down two consecutive regimes in Egypt (until the junta got it right). The rulers of Cairo will be financing and supplying these protests, until Hamas cries uncle and takes a boat ride to Turkey.

Assuming they’ll still have friends up there by that time.

Egypt does view Hamas as an existential problem, seeing as the terrorist government has been supporting al Qaeda-inspired gangs that attack security forces in the Sinai peninsula. According to Reuters, those attacks have longs since crossed the Suez Canal and spread to Egypt’s large cities.

A Hamas official said the comments made to Reuters by Egyptian officials “showed Cairo was inciting violence and trying to provoke chaos.”

Yes, I admit, some news items are more fun to write than others. This one – top ten.

The Hamas forces are estimated at 40,000 soldiers, police and security forces. They rule over a population of 1.8 million people, if any of those numbers can be trusted.

“We know that Hamas is powerful and armed but we also know that there are other armed groups in Gaza that are not on good terms with Hamas and they could be used to face Hamas,” another Egyptian security source told Reuters. “All people want is to eat, drink and have a decent living, and if a government, armed or not, fails to provide that, then the people will rise against it in the end.”

And, naturally, the more people starve, the easier it will become to lure them out into the streets, at which point the Hamas thugs will crack down on them, cameras will snap, mayhem will erupt, until something will give.

The Israeli Air Force targeted two terror sites in central and southern Gaza early Monday evening in retaliation for two rocket attacks near Sderot in the northern Negev shortly after the former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was buried nearby at his Shikmim Farm home.

The IDF confirmed “direct hits” on the targets, which were identified only as part of the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza. No injuries were reported.

“The terrorists and their infrastructure operating in the Gaza Strip will not succeed in their grotesque intentions,” said IDF Spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner. “The IDF will seek them out, eliminate their capabilities and pursue them wherever they may hide. Hamas and its terrorist servants are not immune; it is our moral obligation and calling to protect Israel against such atrocious acts. ”

Hamas fired two rockets early Monday morning, drawing a stern warning from the IDF not to shoot during the funeral.

The terrorist organization honored the request but immediately returned to action minutes after Sharon was buried.

Hamas, always looking for a chance to remind Israel exactly with whom it is dealing, attacked Israel with two rockets minutes after the end of the funeral for former Prime Minister Monday. He was buried at his family farm and home, located near Sderot and less than two miles, as the rocket flies, from northern Gaza.

The missiles exploded in open areas in the Sderot area and caused no damage or injuries.

Hamas managed to restrain itself, under IDF threat, from interrupting the funeral with a “salute” to Sharon. Now that the former Prime Minister is buried, the army, under government orders, apparently is less concerned about enemy rocket attacks.

Former General, Defense Minister and Prime Ariel Sharon was buried at his Shikmim Farm in the northern Negev Monday afternoon as a large number of reporters and small number of private citizens attended.

Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab countries with home Israel has a peace treaty, did not send any representatives to the memorial earlier in the day or to the funeral.

Turkey also did not send an official. Nor did China, Japan, South Africa and India, among other countries.

If old soldiers “just fade away,” then Sharon was one of them. He was considered a great soldier and general but he really did fade away, as evidenced by bitter memories, an eight-year coma and the sparse turnout at the Knesset, where his coffin was displayed on Sunday, and at the funeral Monday afternoon.

There were only three eulogies, two from Sharon’s sons Omri and Gilad and the first by IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, who noted that Sharon was buried at his home after having returned there for the last time following eight years in a coma in hos Tel Aviv hospital room. “The IDF you so cherished will continue in your footsteps for many years,” Gantz said.

The late Prime Minister’s younger son Gilad delivered the last eulogy, noting his father’s political and military contributions. He added that Ariel Sharon built more than 100 communities, particularly those in the Golan Heights m Judea and Samaria.

No one, of course, would note at the funeral that Sharon also destroyed nearly two dozen of those communities in the expulsion from Gaza and northern Samaria in 2005.

Omri Sharon said “Look around Ariel, Look around and see the people who cherish your memory.”

Omri was looking at the people who had to come – the politicians, the military brass and police officers, who outnumbered the 100 or so people who were at the Sharon family farm where Sharon was buried.

More obvious were the thousands of people who did not come, not counting the Arabs.

Three factors kept people away from the funeral – bitter memories on both sides of the political fence, the long coma that made Sharon appear all but dead for years, and scary warnings from official sources of clogged highways and tough security checks.

The Arabs and lefties have only one memory of Sharon, a man who supposedly wanted nothing more to spill as much blood as possible.

The rightwing will never erase the memory of the Prime Minister of Israel ordering bulldozers to destroy the homes of 9,000 Jews and ordering the police and even the armed forces, whose job is to defend the country from enemies, yanking women and children, as well as men who served as combat soldiers and officers in the IDF, from their homes.

Hamas wanted to attend the funeral, which was only about a mile away from northern Gaza, with rocket fire but after having launched a couple in the morning, apparently heeded a stern warning by the IDF of what was in store for Gaza if it tried to do during the funeral.

Earlier in the day, at the memorial ceremony in the Latrun army site, where Sharon was injured in the War for Independence in 1948, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden  said, “We’ll never know what the ultimate arc of Sharon’s life had been if he had been able to pursue his goal of peace.”

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair remarked, “The state he fought for from the age of 14 had to be protected. When that meant fighting he fought. When that meant peace he sought peace… All Israeli leaders I’ve encountered have something unusual and precious – true love of country, state and land.”

President Shimon Peres, who planted a wreath of flowers after the funeral ceremony, said at the memorial. “You cultivated the land with your scythe and defended it with your sword.”

Not everyone made the expulsion of Jews disappear from memorial speeches. Ze’ev Zambish, long identified with the Amana organization that has built thousands of homes for Jews in Judea and Samaria, commented that the expulsion was “painful” but that he still “has a great love” for Sharon.

The Palestinian Authority has embarked on a daily campaign to solidify ties with Bedouin protesters in the Negev, where the Jews are an increasingly smaller minority outside of Be’er Sheva.

“Hundreds of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship demonstrated in Beersheba outside of the office for the Authority for the Regulation of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev on Thursday to protest ongoing house demolitions,” the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency reported.

“The demonstrators chanted the Palestinian national anthem and waved Palestinian flags,” it added.

It quoted the mayor of the Bedouin city of Rahat, approximately 15 miles north of Be’er Sheva, as calling the authority a “second government which endeavors to displace the Bedouins and steal their lands.”

Sound familiar?

If all of the land in Judea and Samaria and more than half of Jerusalem belongs to the “Palestinians” and almost all of the Negev belongs to Bedouin, the Palestinian Authority can call Israel a “Jewish state” just to mock the idea because the government of Tel Aviv has malignly neglected the Galilee, east of Haifa, and all of the Negev, where Arabs and Bedouin are the majority.

It is not a coincidence and it is not just rhetoric when protesting Bedouin call their land “Palestine.”

Canada’s new Ambassador to Israel is Toronto lawyer Vivian Bercovici, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird announced Wednesday.

She is a former Finance Ministry policy adviser and a severe critic of the Palestinian Authority.

She’s smart and capable and will be able to represent this government well,” said Baird , who pointed out that she will be the representative to Israel exclusively and not the Palestinian Authority.

Asked about a general consensus that she is far from being a fan of the Palestinian Authority, Baird replied, “It won’t be a huge shock to anyone that Canada is a strong supporter of Israel.”

The appointment comes less than two weeks before Prime Minister Stephen Harper will make his first trip to Israel as head of the government.

Bercovici writes a column in the Toronto Star, where last April she lambasted major media for not exposing the Palestinian Authority’s goon squad tactics to squelch press freedom while trying to turn Israel into a miserable offender.

Last January she wrote, “The Palestinian leadership, in the meantime, carries on with its unequivocal message — calling for the destruction of Israel — disseminated openly in political forums, the tightly controlled media and taught freely in schools and universities.

“That western leaders, among them President Barack Obama and U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague, regard Israel as the peace spoiler, defies logic.”