Palestinian Authority officials have stated that Israel is trying to “exert pressure” in peace talks by not agreeing to accept a document from Gaza with the letterhead of “State of Palestine.”

The document was a request from officials in Gaza to allow 190 residents to leave Gaza for medical care in Israel, including Arab hospitals in Judea and Samaria. Israeli military officials objected to the letterhead, and the patients were allowed to cross into Israel after “State of Palestine” was blurred out.

That would seem to the end of the matter, with an “all’s well that ends well” conclusion.

But the Palestinian Authority regime in Ramallah, along with its Hamas colleagues in Gaza, as usual tried to turn the issue against Israel, blaming it not only for blocking medical care but also for supposedly exploiting sick people for political purposes.

“This is a political decision from the Israelis to exert pressure in the negotiations,” a senior Palestinian official at the Gaza district coordination office told the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency.

If that isn’t “calling the kettle black,” what is?

Besides all of the “core issues” on Jerusalem, so-called refugees and borders, the heart of the Palestinian Authority-Israeli dispute is PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s refusal to agree to a “State of Palestine” unless all arguments and issues are settled without any further demands.

The letter from Gaza was no more and no less than cynical exploitation of ailing men, women and children to “exert pressure in the negotiations,” to borrow the quote from the PA official.

Once Israel accepts a document from Hamas as being from the “State of Palestine,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry can put it on a silver platter and present it to President Barack Obama. Once the “State of Palestine” is a fait accompli, the “core issues” fall like a house of dominoes because as head of an official state.”

Abbas can declare that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east and so it will be, at least on paper. He can divide Jerusalem, define Israel’s borders and go the United Nations to pass a resolution that UNRWA should send to Israel several million Arabs living under U.N. occupation foreign countries.

International wire services, of course, were not content to let their readers draw conclusions without biased information. Maher Abukhater is an “a Palestinian journalist based in Ramallah” and is The Los Angeles Times’ source for information for everything they know about Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

His “objectivity” can be understood by his former position as managing editor of Al-Fajr English weekly and The Palestine Times. There is not one former managing editor of any Israeli newspaper who reports for any major foreign news organization, or even a minor one. Let’s see The New York Times hire me to cover Israel.

Abukhater made sure that his readers in the United States know that “the PLO declared independence unilaterally in 1988 and was recognized as a ‘non-member observer state’ by the United Nations in 2012.”

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

The PLO declared itself an independent state, so that makes it one?

When Israel, declared by the United Nations as a full member and independent country, passes a law that  it is the sovereign authority over and in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, used by foreign armies to wage war in 1967, that is not acceptable.

Abukhater then hit his readers over the head with the hammer and wrote, “More than 130 countries today recognize Palestine’s existence as a state, but Israel refuses to do so.”

The PR folks at the pro-Hamas movements have come up the gimmick of using children to win attention in their effort to stop Israel from preventing terrorists and arms to enter Gaza by sea.

After numerous failures of the Free Gaza organization to win more than a day or two of sympathy in the headlines by sending boats to Gaza ports with unneeded food and medicines, which are freely shipped in by land from Israel, the so-called Free Palestine Movement organization has announced a “mini-Ark” flotilla to be launched on Saturday. “Free Gaza” endorses the stunt.

The idea is to let hundreds of children sail to bring “attention to the devastating conditions for children living inside the Gaza Strip, as fuel to run their society and other essentials have been denied to them… Children can’t study at night, because there is no electricity, and many of them are reading by candlelight.”

The organizers forgot to mention that most of Gaza’s electricity is run with fuel that is sent by Egypt.

Israel used to ship fuel to Gaza, but Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas put an end to that by ending its subsidy to fuel from Israel. The Palestinian Authority justified its move with the reasoning that offering cheap fuel to Gaza “was unfair” to Arabs in Judea and Samaria.

Free translation: Let’s make Gaza residents suffer enough so they will overthrow Hamas.

Hamas used to bring in approximately a quarter of million gallons of diesel into Gaza from Egypt through smuggling tunnels, but the military regime in Egypt shut them down.

It wants to make sure the smuggling tunnels are not used for other commodities, such as explosives, anti-aircraft guns and other humanitarian aid.

Regardless of the Palestinian Authority and Egyptian moves against Hamas in Gaza, the pro-Hamas champions always can count on Jews like Noam Chomsky to give them a sympathetic ear and earn a couple of headlines while exploiting children as weapons for a pro-terrorist agenda.

Chomsky stated, “It was incredibly moving, and inspiring, to learn about the Mini Arks that are to sail from Gaza on November 30. The courage and heroism of the people of Gaza, enduring shocking crimes and torture, is one of the wonders of the age. I hope that the arks that the children are sending forth will at least reach the conscience of the world, and help bring these horrors to an end.”

The children indeed are suffering, but it will be difficult to convince the foreign press, which has run out of excuses to blame Israel for Gaza’s woes. Even The New York Times this month cited the facts for a change and reported, “Egypt’s new military-backed government closed the smuggling tunnels that were used to transport around one million liters (about 260,000 gallons) of diesel here each day. Hamas has refused to import Israeli diesel because of taxes imposed by the Palestinian Authority.”

The Free Gaza movement ran out of steam with the IHH flotilla in 2009, when the IDF faced club-wielding terrorists when soldiers in the Navy tried to board the Mavi Mamara ship that was headed for Gaza.

The IDF soldiers, three of whom had been kidnapped on board and brutally beaten, overcame the terrorists, nine of whom were killed. If you listen to people like Free Gaza co-founder Mary Thompson, it was “Zionist pirates” who attacked the ship “resulting in the murder of nine unarmed passengers.” Metal clubs and knives apparently olive branches and not weapons

A U.N. investigation noted that the maritime embargo was legal.

The clincher that showed the flotilla movement as being a farce was that there was no humanitarian aid aboard the Mavi Mamara.

The Gaza terror tunnel uncovered last week was built using an estimated 500 tons of concrete and cement, including 24,000 concrete slabs that Israel permitted into Gaza.

The tunnel took 2 years to build, and apparently wasn’t yet completed. It started in Absan al-Zarir, east of Khan Yunis in Gaza, and had exits within the fence of Kibbutz Ein HaShlosha in a wheat field.

The tunnel’s length was approximately a mile long, and was located around 18 meters underground.

The Gazans laid electrical and cable wire along the length of the tunnel.

A report published by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Unit (COGAT) shows a 10 percent increase in the number of Palestinian Authority Arabs who received treatment in Israeli hospitals in 2012.

The total number of 219,464 patients, 21,270 of them children, includes the companions accompanying the patients in Israel.

The numbers represent  a dramatic increase in the number of PA Arabs who receive treatment by Israelis medical professionals, compared with 197,713 patients in Israeli hospitals in 2011 and only 144,838 in 2008.

COGAT, a military unit which is responsible for implementing the Israeli Government’s policy in Judea and Samaria, stated, “The Civil Administration, through its health department (HDCA), works closely with the Palestinian Ministry of Health to support the medical needs of the Palestinian population throughout Judea and Samaria.” The HDCA manages all issues relating to Israeli-Palestinian healthcare coordination, primarily the transfer of Palestinian patients to hospitals in Israel.

The HDCA further works to enable professional medical training for Palestinian Authority Arabs by Israel through the encouragement of medical conferences and the training of Palestinian medical staff in Israeli hospitals. Training sessions take place several times a year, initiated by both the HDCA and the Palestinian Authority.

In 2012, the Civil Administration paid $560,000 to send PA Arab doctors, nurses, and paramedics for training in Israel. The Civil Administration has also set aside a budget to finance critical medical procedures for patients who are not covered by Palestinian or UNRWA health insurance and are not able to pay privately.

Tazpit’s Anav Silverman reported last year that Suhila Abd el-Salam, the sister of Hamas Prime Minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, accompanied her husband for treatment in Israel. Her husband was admitted to Bellinson Hospital, in Petach Tikvah, for immediate medical treatment following a serious heart condition.

Haniyeh’s sister and her husband requested permission to travel to Israel to receive the necessary medical treatment because Gaza hospitals could not properly treat the condition.

This was not the only time that a Gaza resident was treated in Israel. This past March, a 15-year-old boy in Gaza was transported to the Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot after suffering from severe burns and shrapnel injuries from an alleged rocket launching pad that was set up in Jabalya, a neighborhood in northern Gaza.

The Palestinian Minister of Health, Dr. Hanni Abadin, paid an unprecedented visit to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem at the beginning of this past May.

Dr. Yuval Weiss, director of the hospital, reported that at any given moment there are some 60 Palestinian Authority medical personnel in training at the hospital. Dr. Abadin thanked Hadassah for the opportunity to visit and for its services, visited Arab children hospitalized at Hadassah and gave them gifts.

The Civil Administration Health Department declared that it will continue in 2013 to cooperate closely with their PA counterparts and international organizations in Judea and Samaria to advance healthcare for the benefit of all residents in the region.

Best-selling American author and entrepreneur Harvey Mackay recently visited the IDF Home Front Command, learned about its training and life-saving missions abroad, and came away as another unofficial ambassador for the IDF.

Mackay, author of five New York Times best-selling business books, viewed a video documenting the IDF’s life-saving work in Haiti following the disastrous 2010 earthquake and commented, “It’s a shame that the whole world couldn’t see what I just saw with my own eyes. I had no idea that these miraculous things were performed in 12 countries,” he said, referring to the 17 aid delegations sent by the IDF to assist following natural disasters in a dozen different countries over the past 26 years.

“The one thing that’s apparent more than anything else on this tour is the incredible human value every Israeli has for [every single] life,” he added. “It’s one thing for them to say it, but if you look into their eyes attentively, you can see they really mean it.”

Best-selling US author Harvey Mackay visits Home Front Command

A coalition of Jewish groups coordinated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is providing more than $100,000 in aid to Syrian refugees in Jordan.

The Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief, which is made up of 14 organizations and coordinated by the Joint, convened Thursday in New York to allocate the money to several groups providing aid to Syrian refugees in refugee camps in Jordan, a JDC spokesman told JTA.

The money is going to the Jordanian Red Crescent, which is the kingdom’s version of the Red Cross; Israel Flying Aid, for food distribution; World Jewish Relief, which is working with the Save the Children program in one of the refugee camps; and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), for resettlement work.

Approximately 1 million refugees from Syria’s two-year-old civil war have fled in roughly equal numbers to Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.

Israeli officials have joined international efforts to save an 8-year-old boy who was mauled by a wild hyena in Ethiopia.

Bedouin-Israeli diplomat Ismail Khaldi and Israel’s ambassador to Ethiopia, Belaynesh Zevadia, are spearheading a campaign for contributions for bringing Abdul Razek to the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya.

Five months ago, the hyena attacked Abdul’s village, killing five and injuring 15. Abdul suffered severe head, scalp and eye injuries, and lost one of his ears. The estimated cost of the operation is $40,000.

With most of the money raised, it is expected the boy could come to Israel by the end of the week.

Dr. Rick Hodes of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is on a mission in Ethiopia and interceded with the hospital on behalf of the child.

As I was scrolling down the daily “headlines” sent by The New York Times yesterday, I noticed two interesting ones:

U.N. Agency Suspends Food Aid in Gaza After Protesters Break Into Its Compound

and

U.N. Says It Is Running Out of Money to Assist Wave of Refugees From Syria

Even the United Nations seems very occupied with problems in the Middle East much greater than anything going on in Israel including my town of Shiloh.

“There will be no food tomorrow,” said Adnan Abu Hasna, a spokesman for the agency, which provides nutrition, education, health and other services to 815,000 Palestinians who are refugees and their descendants, nearly half of Gaza’s population. “The food distribution centers and the relief offices will be closed in the coming days unless there’s a real security being provided to the life of our staff, because there is a great concern about their safety.”

How long will the United Nations support and perpetuate the Arab’s refugee status?

“The needs are rising exponentially, and we are broke,” Marixie Mercado, a spokeswoman for Unicef, told reporters in Geneva. “Across the region, a lot of our operations are going to have to start scaling down unless we get money.”

The warning came as President Bashar al-Assad, in a rare interview with a foreign media outlet, said that if Syria broke up or came under the control of “terrorist forces,” this would immediately spill over into neighboring countries first, and that a domino effect would reach countries across the Middle East.

Shouldn’t the United States, its President Barack Obama and his Cabinet be more concerned about what all the instability mentioned in these articles than what is happening in Israel?

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