Israel Police have arrested Ziad Awad, one of the 1,027 terrorists released two-and-a-half years ago in exchange for IDF hostage Gilad Shalit, on suspicion that Awad was responsible for the murder of Baruch Mizrahi  on Passover eve near Hebron.

Mizrahi, a senior police officer, was on his way to a holiday Seder meal when he was ambushed and murdered, reportedly by Awad, a resident of Idna, an Arab village near Hebron.

Mizrahi’s wife was also wounded in the attack.

Baruch Mizrachi

Police said Monday that they unearthed the signs that identified Awad as Mizrahi’s killer during the manhunt for Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shayer and Naftali Frenkel.

Evidence includes DNA samples, finger prints and other incriminating material were collected at the attack scene.

An indictment was filed today (Jun. 23) against Awad for murder and attempted murder. In addition, Awad’s son, A Adin Awad (18), was also arrested for abetting the attack by helping his father flee the scene.

Ziad Awad (L) and his son Izz Eddin (R) arriving to Ofer Mlitary court on June 23, 2014. They were arrested on May 7 by the Israel Police’s elite counter-terrorism unit in collaboration with the Shin Bet security service for the April 14 shooting of B aruch Mizrachi, the 47-year-old father of five. The senior Awad is accused of carrying out the shooting, while his son allegedly assisted him in planning the shooting and coordinating the escape.

Noam Shalit, who pressured successive Israeli governments to make the lopsided prisoner swap instead of demanding action by international human rights groups, told YNet on the arrest, “I didn’t know that one of the terrorists freed in the deal killed Baruch Mizrachi. It wasn’t me that put together the list of prisoners to release.”

Shalit added, “We didn’t demand the release of these prisoners or others.”

Here is an ad from the Free Gilad Shalit campaign, consisting of former Shabak chiefs demanding the release of terrorists, and even saying they won’t pose a danger:

Too many of those involved in freeing these terrorists deny their responsibility.

Content from Tazpit News Agency was used in this report.

The IDF uncovered dozens of tunnel networks throughout Hebron as well as in Judea and Samaria that they weren’t previously aware of, according to a YNet report.

The tunnel were located inside homes, with the entrances hidden underneath furniture and heavy appliances.

The IDF also uncovered 20 underground bomb factories, as well secret rooms hidden under various homes.

The IDF was not aware of the extent of the tunnel system before the search for Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaar and Naftali Frankel began. They’ve sent special units into the tunnels to search for the kidnapped boys.

Tens of thousands of pits, wells and caves, some of them dating back to Biblical times, dot the Hebron area where forces have been searching for a clue that might shed light on the fate of the three teenagers kidnapped by Palestinian Authority terrorists 10 days ago.

The search is practically endless. Some of the wells, like the one a few hundred feet from our house in the southern Hebron Hills, still have water in them. Many are empty, except for the possibility of one that was defiled by the snakes of the Palestinian Authority terrorists, and it makes no difference if they are from Hamas or not. They snatched Gilad, Naftali and Eyal and have cruelly not demanded ransom nor have they left a clue concerning their fate.

Rainfall in Hebron averages approximately 20 inches a year and half that amount in the southern Hebron Hills. Local residents began digging wells thousands of years ago, enabling them to have access water all year because the wells tapped into underground flows of water. Thousands of the wells are dry this time of year.

Without local experts, mostly Arabs who know the lay of the land, the army cannot locate all of the wells. One of the Jews very familiar with the area is Yaron Rosenthal, a tour guide and director of the Kfar Etzion Field School. He volunteered on Shabbat to help the IDF because he knows every rock and thorn in the area where Eyal, Naftali and Gilad were abducted.

The police, whose management and operations need to be torn to pieces and rebuilt professionally from the ground up, compounded their incompetency in the terrorist kidnap. Last week, police ignored for several hours an urgent and desperate call from one of the kidnap victims that he and two others were being kidnapped. By the time frantic appeals by one of the abducted boys’ fathers convinced the police to inform the IDF, several hours of valuable time had been lost.

This Saturday, police arrived at the area after Rosenthal pounced on a gang of Jews, who he said were from the community of Bat Ayin and were attacking a Bedouin youth.

The police immediately arrested Rosenthal, whom they saw hitting the Jewish gang, as they ignored Rosenthal’s report of the gang’s attack.

The incident is another aside in the torturous wait for news of the fate of the three youth. Rosenthal’s search eliminated several possibly locations of the bodies of the boys, if they have been killed.

The crude truth is that the terrorists could have murdered the boys, weighed down their bodies with rocks, threw them into a well of water and then covered them with more rocks to avoid discovery. One big hole in that theory is that the wells are used for drawing water, so covering one of them up would not remain a secret very long.

Even if the army could search all of the dry holes and caves in the Hebron region, there is a possibility that the terrorists planned the kidnapping so carefully that they dug a deep hole in some olive grove months ago to use it to bury bodies of victims. If that is the case, the search could go on forever unless there is a tipoff to intelligence personnel.

If the boys are alive, they likely are being kept in a deep underground tunnel, completely equipped with electricity and where they could be held for months or even for years. If that is the case, the tunnel, like hundreds in Gaza, exists under one of tens of thousands of homes in the Hebron area.

Foreign media have outdone themselves proving their ignorance of Israel by several media establishment articles focusing on the dangers of hitchhiking and burying the thought that there might be something wrong with terrorists kidnapping three Israeli youth trying to thumb a ride home.

The Christian Science Monitor, the BBC and The New York Times and are only three examples of the mindset that has imprisoned “journalists” for decades when it comes to reporting on Israel. It is not open anti-Semitism and it not anti-Zionism, both of which simply are ingrained in the Western mentality that Jews are to blame for anything that goes wrong.

There is lot of truth to that, but that is for God and not journalists to decide. If the Associated Press had been around at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, it would have reported that the Romans overpowered the Jews. It would not have told its readers that the Jews lost Jerusalem because of “loshon hara,” the practice of speaking evil about others and which Talmudic rabbis noted was the root cause of Israel’s downfall.

Today’s journalists are instant rabbis and know what makes God  allows terrorists to masquerade as Jews and snatch three yeshiva students, as if they were lifeless bumps on the road that terrorists ride to hell.

Only two days after Naftali, Eyal and Gilad were abducted, the Monitor headlined, “Why were kidnapped Israeli teens hitchhiking in the West Bank?”

The journalists writing the article ever thought to ask the question, ”Why were Arabs, wanting a peaceful Palestinian Authority state kidnapping Jewish boys?”

The New York Times’ Isabel Kershner, a known leftist whose lack of objectivity is defined by her refraining from personal visits to Jews in the “occupied territories,” wrote an article headlined, “Abduction of Young Israeli Hitchhikers Spurs Debate on Conduct.”

One would think that the debate on conduct would be over whether it is proper for “militants” trying to pressure Israel to release terrorists, excuse me, “prisoners.” Of course, her concern really was the conduct of Jews, who have the chutzpah not only to live or learn in Judea and Samaria but also to hitchhike there.

And the BBC chimed in with, “Israel: Hitchhiking continues despite kidnap dangers.”

No one should be surprised at this New Age of being “fair,” a world in which there is no wrong but simply two sides of right, with terrorist and hitchhikers weighed together on the same scale. Terrorists are militants, if not freedom fighters, and Jews are settlers, if not illegitimate.

The Monitor article, by staff writer Christa Case Bryant, was preceded by this blurb: “Despite living in a conflict zone, many Israeli settlers hitchhike in the West Bank, often waiting for rides on roads frequented by Palestinian drivers.”

She led off the second paragraph by writing, “No one is questioning why they were hitchhiking late at night on a highway frequented by many Palestinians.” She explained that people try to hitch rides because of lack of patience but, more than that, by “a pioneer ethos fueled by faith and an unswerving belief in their right to this land. Most Israeli settlers are unwilling to be held hostage by fear of their Palestinian neighbors or by the United Nations, which has deemed their presence here illegal under international law.”

There are few settlers who hitch in order to show off or mock Arabs. My wife, I and our five children hitch in the southern Hebron Hills because we have to get from one place to next in an area where there are four or five buses from  6 a.m. to 11 p.m., and we represent the silent and not so silent majority.

Any journalist can find some young man or woman to say how he or she hitches because “this is our land and the Arabs can go to Jordan” but that is just a big mouth with nothing to say.

Settlers prove they can live where they want in Israel and that Arabs can go to Jordan by putting their legs where their mouths are. That is the ideology behind “hilltop outposts,” which, by the way, include an unusually large proportion of kids with super ADD and ADHD who probably would be in jail for drugs if they didn’t find an outlet such as playing the role of the forefather Abraham.

The Western media’s misunderstanding of hitchhiking also reflects their own paranoia in their own countries. When I took off one summer in the very early 1960s to hitchhike across the country from Baltimore, it was safe, except for the temptations of sin from which God had enough mercy on me to stand in the way.

Perhaps that explains an article in The New York Times Thursday by film director and author John Waters, who, according to the newspaper, “hitchhiked across the United States and lived to tell the tale.” The good ol’ United States really ain’t what it used to be..

Waters told the interviewer. “Picking up a hitchhiker is as much an adventure as it is to hitchhike. It’s a risk on both sides. And they’re good people, I think. Basically trusting. And they’ve been through something. Everyone had survived something, and they wanted to talk about it.”

That is not Israel. This is a small country with a big family that helps each other, even when fighting each other, and which knows its enemies, except for inexperienced teenagers who can’t see through the disguises that their terrorist kidnappers used to snare them off the road last Thursday.

Given the cock-eyed view from the West, it is understandable that Kershner wrote in the second paragraph in her article for the Times, “The abductions also have stirred more hushed debate over the conduct of Jewish settlers in the West Bank — particularly what many consider the cavalier practice of hitchhiking — and the price that Israel has paid to redeem its captives.”

A journalist can always find enough people to give a quote or two to state a prejudiced view, but what you expect when Kershner interviews people in the fancy Azrielli Mall in Tel Aviv and not at the Be’er Sheva bus station?

Everyone, of course, expressed their sympathy for the victims, but one woman added she was “’a little angry about the lack of responsibility” of Israeli youths hitchhiking at night in the West Bank. Another shopper browsing at a bookstore added that the West Bank was ‘prone to trouble.’”

That is about the same one-sided reaction the writer could have gotten, only to the other extreme, if she had interviewed people in the community of Beit El or Yitzhar, in Samaria.

The BBC contributed to the world’s ignorance of Israel by reporting that “travelers are likely to ignore a directive from Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that ‘bans’ hitchhiking in the wake of the disappearance of three teenagers, it seems.”

It turns out the report is a bald-faced lie because in the very next sentence, the BBC quotes an Israeli newspaper as stating, that the Prime Minister “’directed’ all settlers and travelers in Judea and Samaria [West Bank] not to take rides offered by strangers.”

It is acceptable that the BBC does not understand Hebrew, but does it have a problem with English, also?

The office of Prime Minister Netanyahu said people should not take rides from ”strangers,” and that’s miles of a difference from a directive that “’bans’ hitchhiking altogether.

Buried in this entire discussion is the prejudice of the newspapers that the virtues and sins of hitchhiking are far more of a burning issue than the virtues and sins of your average terrorist kidnapping three yeshiva students.

The reportage is code. When the media establishment jumps on kidnap victims as being reckless because they hitch a ride where they know Arab terrorists may be roaming, it really means that the Jews are to blame because they live, oy, in Judea and Samaria.

That kind of reminds me of 20 some years ago when I was visiting my late parents in Baltimore and gave a talk at some local Jewish meeting on the real meaning of “peace,” the Oslo Accords and the Arabs’ displeasure with my living “beyond the Green Line.”

After what I immodestly considered an eloquent talk about the word “Shalom,” which is a synonym for God, which cannot even be uttered in the bathroom and which does not mean “make a deal,” and after explaining that the Arabs often throw rocks at us and try to shoot us, one gentleman stood up and asked, “Well, if the Arabs don’t want you there, why don’t you just move to Tel Aviv?”

Moving forward in time to September 2013, Sgt. Tomer Hazan was working with a Palestinian Authority Arab in metropolitan Tel Aviv. The Arab convinced his friend, an off-duty soldier to join him after work. They traveled to Samaria, where the Arab murdered his co-worker.

It is difficult to understand.

If the Arabs don’t want Jews living in Tel Aviv, why don’t the Jews just leave and hitch a ride back to Baltimore?

In Wednesday’s press briefing, US State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki called for restraint on all side, during the search for the three kidnapped boys.

MS. PSAKI: Well, Said, we’ve been in touch with both the Israelis and the Palestinians throughout the course of the last several days since these teenagers were kidnapped. We know this is a difficult time obviously on the ground. We’ve urged continued security cooperation between the Israelis and the Palestinians in the search for the kidnapped teenagers. We were encouraged by President Abbas’s strong statement to the Arab and Islamic foreign ministers today in Saudi Arabia. But – and certainly as the search continues and in our conversations, we urge both sides to exercise restraint and avoid the types of steps that could destabilize the situation. And that’s a message that we are conveying in all of our conversations as well.

After 6 days, she also finally admitted that one of the kidnapped boys is an American citizen.

MS. PSAKI: We do, yes. So we can confirm that one of the kidnapped was an American citizen.

But after 6 days, Psaki doesn’t actually know his name.

QUESTION: Which one? MS. PSAKI: I believe his name has been reported. I don’t have it in front of me right now.

The State Department still believes that paying the PA, which then pays Hamas had no influence in Hamas’s decisions (such as pulling their financial chestnuts out of the fire).

QUESTION: But there’s – numerous Israeli officials have said that the U.S. decision to work with and continue to fund the Palestinian government, the new unity government, is – contributes – contributed to this incident with the three – is it – am I correct in thinking that you still would reject such an allegation?

MS. PSAKI: Yes, that is correct.

Keep that certainty of hers in mind, while recalling that Ms. Psaki couldn’t even bother to learn the name of the kidnapped American boy.

It’s Naftali Frenkel.

The IDF and Israeli security forces have continued their operation over night to locate the three abducted boys, Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shayer and Naftali Frenkel, while decimating the Hama terror infrastructure in Judea and Samaria.

The IDF carried out night raids throughout all of Judea and Samaria, this time meeting little resistance.

An IDF spokesman announced that as part of an extensive series of intelligence and operational activities, security forces arrested 65 wanted persons; 51 of them were released as part of the Shalit deal in 2011. They further shut down a terrorist affiliated radio station. Ten brigades are participating in these operations. Since the beginning of the operation some 240 terrorists were arrested and about 800 homes were searched. Hundreds of weapons have been uncovered during these searches.

The Gazan front appears to be heating up. Hamas officials from Gaza have threatened to retaliate against the IDF’s operations against their infrastructure. In the past 14 days, 11 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel. There are reports of the IDF deploying more Iron Dome anti-rocket systems throughout the south.

The spokesman stated that extensive army operations will continue and deepen as required. “The IDF will relentlessly continue its operational activities and intelligence work. The IDF will bring significant damage to terrorist organizations and act decisively against anyone who activates terror against the State of Israel,” said the spokesman.

Brigadier General Nitzan Alon, GOC Central Command, stated that Hamas would emerge from this operation strategically weakened. However, he stressed that the operation was not short term. “We are in the midst of a complex operation to capture terrorists and to return the boys home safely. We are fighting a complex and ongoing campaign that will not end soon. Hamas has been compromised in all its dimensions. Hamas leaders have already admitted their injury. Hamas will emerge from this ongoing battle weakened operationally and strategically. We will continue this assault to the extent necessary, and do everything to bring the boys back home safely,” stated Alon.

The latest Arab social media campaign is the three-fingered salute, celebrating the kidnapping of three Jewish boys, Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shayar and Naftali Frenkel, by Hamas.

They’re calling it the the “three Shalits” in reference to Gilad Shalit who was captured and kept hostage by Hamas until Israel released 1000 terrorists in exchange.

Now, look what all these proud Palestinian Authority parents have done. They’ve baked cakes. They photographed their little children showing solidarity with Hamas for kidnapping the boys.

They then proudly post the photographs of their children celebrating the kidnapping of Jewish children onto all the social media sites.

What a sick society they have created and are perpetrating onto the next generation.

Update: The blog Israellycool has amassed a very large collection of these photos.

Here are photos of initial Arab celebrations of the kidnapping of the three Jewish boys.