Israel is set to release in the coming days 26 terrorists who killed Israeli citizens. Of the 26 terrorists set to be freed, 21 came from Judea and Samaria, and 5 from Gaza. Most committed their terror attacks before Oslo, and served sentences ranging from 19 to 28 years.

A point being repeated by Israeli official sources and is being echoed by all the local news media is that all those prisoners to be released committed their murders against innocents civilians before the Oslo agreement was signed. The idea must be that, had those killers been aware of a peace treaty with the “Jewish apes” they would have refrained from murdering them and possibly limited their aggression to table tennis and long hikes along the green line.

Except that — oops — the first Oslo accords were signed in Washington DC on Sepember 13, 1993, and Israel’s official list of the victims of Palestinian murder includes these two Jewish men:

Issac Rosenberg (67). Murdered March 29, 1994 by 2 terrorists with an ax. Murdered while working in Petach Tikva. Murdered after Oslo. Left behind a wife and son.

Yigal Vaknin (22). Murdered September 24, 1993, in Batzra, near Raanana. Stabbed to death. Murdered after Oslo. Left behind parents and eight brothers and sisters.

(Thanks to Moshe Matitya for the h/t.)

Can it be true? Is it possible that the Netanyahu-Livni peace dealers are lying to the public? We at the Jewish Pres online refuse to believe such an insinuation, and are certain that the murderers of these two blameless Jews were included by mistake. And now, that it’s become clear that their pending release is rooted in an error, the government will make sure to inform the prison authority and take them back to their cells.

Because our government is decent and democratic and would never, ever lie to us!

Another reason we know this must be a mistake, has to do with the rebuke that chief negotiator Tzipi Livni has sent Naftali Bennett’s way, telling him he was cynically attempting to destroy a process that the government has already approved and is on its way. Someone claiming the high moral ground, like Minister Tzipi Livni, could not possibly lie about the dates when the prisoners she’s releasing committed their murders.

Incidentally, Tzipi Livni’s circle continue to argue that any attempt on the part of Jewish Home to object to Tzipi Livni is tantamount to a call for her assassination, and they point out that a few days ago some guy up north spat in Tzipi Livni’s faction member’s face, and that’s how all assassinations usually start. First you spit at the Archduke Ferdinand, then you throw a bomb at his procession.

welcome to Israel, the land where every season is the silly season.

Here is the list of the other Jews who were murdered, and the circumstances of their demise. If you’re angry after reading this list and livid at the release of the murderers it means you’re holding on to a measure of sanity. If you consider letting their 26 killers go the price of making peace, you are quite possibly insane.

David Reuven (59). Murdered April 20, 1991. Beaten to death, while tied up in a mini-market where he worked. Left behind a wife, three children, and grandchildren.

Avi Osher (40). Murdered June 28, 1991. Stabbed to death in Moshav Massuah by Arab workers who worked for him for over 15 years. Left behind a wife and two children.

Meir Ben-Yair (33). Murdered June 27, 1985. Shot in his car, in a forest near Jerusalem.

Michal Cohen (32). Murdered June 27, 1985. Shot in her car, while touring in the forest near Jerusalem. Left behind a husband and two children.

Yosef Shirzi (62). Murdered May 29, 1992. Murdered in Eilat, by four terrorists who swam into Eilat. He was working as a guard when he went to investigate suspicious movement, at which point the terrorists shot him. Left behind a wife and three brothers.

Yosef Eliyahu (35). Murdered July 21, 1985. Was touring in Gilboa for work when three terrorists attacked them. The body was found in a cave a week later. Left behind a wife and five children.

Leah Almakais (19). Murdered July 21, 1985. Was touring in Gilboa for work when three terrorists attacked them and strangled her to death. The body was found in a cave a week later. Left behind a parents, brothers and a sister.

Gania Friedman. February 21, 1992. Murdered while walking down the street in Kfar Saba. Her father and two additional bystanders were also stabbed in the attack.

Moti Biton (32). Murdered October 27, 1992. Murdered in the Jezreel Valley, when he entered an Arab owned supermarket. His wife shot at the terrorists. Left behind a wife and three children.

Revital Seri (22). Murdered October 22, 1984. Tied up and shot by terrorists, while hiking near Jerusalem with her boyfriend Ron Levi. Survived by parents and two sisters.

Ron Levi (23). Murdered October 22, 1984. Tied up and shot by terrorists, while hiking near Jerusalem with his girlfriend Revital Seri. Survived by parents and two sisters.

David Kaspi (33). April 19, 1985. Killed by three Arabs passengers in his taxi, who shot him. Left behind a wife and two daughters.

Shimon Cohen (71). Murdered May 28, 1990. Murdered by a bomb in Machane Left behind a wife, five children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Tzvi Klein (44). Murdered December 3, 1991. Murdered in a drive-by shooting, between Jerusalem and Ofra. Left behind a wife and three children.

The Hamas organization accepted responsibility on Sunday for the digging of the “terror tunnel” exposed by the IDF a week and a half ago in the area between Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha and the Gaza Strip border.

It turns out the Hamas has a “military arm,” which is responsible for doing the bad things, while the “civilian arm” continues to receive donations from the nice folks in Europe. This way they make sure that the money donated to Hamas is only used to feed orphans and widows, all of them 100 percent victims of Israeli genocide.

On Sunday, a spokesman for the bad Hamas, a gentleman nicknamed Abu Ubaida, after a medieval Muslim language scholar (on account of the talking, you get it, right?), told the Hamas radio station in Gaza that the Hamas military force “dug the tunnel and were responsible for it.”

Abu Ubaida stated that the tunnel was dug in an attempt to kidnap an Israeli soldier or civilian, and use them to force Israel to release the remaining thousands of Palestinian prisoners in its jails.

Israel has established many times in the past that not only is it happy to negotiate with terrorist, but that it’s willing to give away the story. The going rate for 1,000 jailed Arabs is one captured Israeli.

In 2011, 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, who were collectively responsible for 569 Israeli deaths, were released in exchange for Gilad Shalit. The campaign to release him (see the girls below painting his portrait on the pavement) reassured Hamas that they don’t need to ever give up anything in negotiations, or recognize, not even on paper, the Jews’ right to live. All they need is to get them a succulent Israeli with good, middle class parents.

It should be noted that the IDF blamed Hamas for the tunnel as soon as it was discovered. It also blamed winter for rain, and summer for those long, hot days in August.

It should also be noted that the tunnel required some 500 tons of cement, which was produced in Israel and provided to the Arabs in Gaza for the explicit purpose of rebuilding their neighborhoods following the 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense.

It appears that the Arabs went ahead and used that precious cement to aggressive ends, rather than to construct their homes. In fact, the IDF estimated that an astounding 20% of Hamas’s annual budget goes into building terror tunnels.

This is astonishing, in light of the fact that they’ve never done anything like that before, and no one in Israel could have imagined this kind of treachery. This is a moral failure on the part of the bad Hams, and we certainly hope the good Hamas will give them a sound rebuke!

The tunnel, incidentally, was 45 feet deep in places, and looks like a mini subway tunnel, complete with a track and a small car that could be used to whisk away the kidnapped soldier, even as his or her parents are being called and urged to start organizing a mass grassroots movement to release a thousand murderers.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated the IDF for the discovery, saying it’s all part of Israel’s new, aggressive security policy, which is the reason why we’ve had the “quietest year in a decade” in Gaza, despite the rise in terrorist activity in recent years.

Of course, it could be that the reason the Arabs have been so quiet is that they’re all underground, digging up tunnels.

It’s interesting to note that the Egyptian Army has found a very effective way of securing its own border with the Gaza Strip: they caved in all the tunnels with bulldozers, then used the same bulldozers to raze a swath of several kilometers worth of buildings, creating a no man’s area where Arabs who dare to enter will be shot.

Could we contract the same Egyptians to fix our Gaza problem?

Comments by Israel’s ambassador to Sweden comparing the recently-released Palestinian prisoners to the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik who, on 22 July 2011, bombed government buildings in Oslo, killing 8, then killed 69 on a vacation island, have left relatives of victims of the Utøya massacre seething, Swedish news website The Local reports.

In a Tuesday interview with Svergies Radio (SR), Israeli ambassador Isaac Bachman compared the release of Palestinian prisoners to setting the monster Breivik free.

“The horrors that [the Palestinian prisoners] did, to put it in a Scandinavian understanding, it’s like what happened in Norway with Breivik,” Bachman told SR.

“Imagine if Breivik was released as a gesture of some sort,” he added, and complained that Israel is not getting enough credit for agreeing to the release.

Pointing out the enormous risk Israel was taking with its gesture, Bachman noted that “research has shown that these people will return to crime. It’s not easy to get public support for releasing these people.”

It turns out the good ambassador was completely wrong in his comparison, which seemed completely reasonable to him, but not to the listeners. You see, Breivik – he killed sweet, pink skinned, blond Norwegians, which was a crime against humanity, while the Palestinians only killed Jews. Big difference, apparently, in Scandinavia.

The comments, which came on the eve of Israel’s Wednesday release of 26 Palestinian prisoners, sparked outrage from none other than survivors and family members of victims of Breivik’s 2011 attack, The Local reported.

“I think it is ridiculous to compare this with a mass murderer from Norway,” Trond Blattmann, whose son Torjusdatter was killed when Breivik opened fire on Utøya, told The Local. “There’s no similarity at all. This is a ridiculous way to talk.”

“The comparison does not make sense,” added Bjørn Ihler, who survived the Breivik massacre by hiding on the southern tip of the island. “Breivik was a solo terrorist whose actions were based purely on an unreal situation. The situation in the Middle East is very different. There is a real fight for Palestinian freedom going on.”

You see, when an entire Jewish family, babies and all, is butchered in its own kitchen – that’s freedom fighting. You have to think blond.

Even Middle East expert Per Jönsson with the Swedish Institute for International Affairs (Utrikespolitiska institutets – UI) slammed Bachman’s Breivik comparison.

“The comparison with Brevik is insane in several ways. Breivik is very special. These people that Israel is now releasing are freedom fighters, murderers, and in some cases terrorists, but they are nevertheless rather normal people,” he told the Aftonbladet newspaper.

We have to understand that the reactions from Sweden are an expression of pure, unadulterated Jew hatred, whether those people are aware of it or not. The world is changing around us, and being Jewish is no longer for the faint of heart.

On Wednesday, the State asked the High Court to reject a petition of the families of terror victims against the decision to release 104 Palestinian prisoners as part of renewing the peace process.

The State made ​​it clear that the purpose of the ministerial committee formed to decide on which prisoners will be released and when, is to keep the negotiations secret from some coalition partners.

A quick review of the current coalition partners suggests that the party in government who is most likely to oppose the releases is Jewish Home, as well as the majority of the Likud MKs.

“The decision to appoint a small team of ministers, including concerned senior government ministers, was adopted in order to ensure the confidentiality of the discussions that will take place within the team, so as not to reveal the full breadth of the negotiations conducted with the Palestinians in a way that could harm the peace process and even thwart it,” the state told the court.

The “team” includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitz, Science Minister Yaakov Peri and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni.

There is not a single Jewish Home Party representative on the “team.”

According to the State’s Attorney’s response to the high court, the first group of Palestinian prisoners with Jewish blood on their hands will be released next week, and the next three groups will be released on the fourth, sixth and eighths month of the negotiations with the Palestinians, depending on the success of the talks.

In its response to the victims of terror petition, the state argued that the release of prisoners is a purely political matter, which the High Court has always considered to be outside of its purview.

“The issue of releasing prisoners is an integral part of a political process which the government has begun, and which the decision to release the prisoners an integral part of, and will be made along the way in accordance with the progress made by the two sides of the negotiations,” the State Attorney’s Office insisted. “The position of the bereaved families has been and will be brought before the proper authorities and will be considered as part of every decision.”

Talks between Palestinians and Israelis will resume on Monday evening, the first such formal deliberations in almost three years.

Meetings between top negotiators will take place Monday night and Tuesday in Washington, the U.S. State Department said in a statement. Secretary of State John Kerry has been pressing the sides for a resumption and has visited the region six times since assuming his post in February.

The Israeli side will be represented by Tsipi Livni, the justice minister, and Yitzhak Molcho, the national security adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Saeb Erekat, the top Palestinian negotiator, and Mohammed Shtayyeh, who directs the Palestinian Economic Council and who has ministerial status, will represent the Palestinian Authority.

The State Department release said that the talks would at first focus on the procedure for the talks, but added that the basis for negotiations is in place.

“As Secretary Kerry announced on July 19 in Amman, Jordan, the Israelis and Palestinians had reached agreement on the basis for resuming direct final status negotiations,” it said. It did not elaborate what the basis is.

“The meetings in Washington will mark the beginning of these talks,” it said. “They will serve as an opportunity to develop a procedural workplan for how the parties can proceed with the negotiations in the coming months.”

“Both leaders have demonstrated a willingness to make difficult decisions that have been instrumental in getting to this point. We are grateful for their leadership,” Kerry added in the statement.

The announcement came after Israel promised to release 104 Palestinian prisoners with Jewish blood on their hands.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet met Sunday to debate the prisoner release and to approve the resumption of talks. The 22-member cabinet approved the release by a vote of 13 in favor, seven against and two abstentions.

Likud MK and Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon urged ministers to vote against the release, branding it “a diplomatic mistake, a moral mistake.”

It is still not clear whether the released prisoners will include 14 Israeli Arabs—which the PA made clear would be a deal breaker. Sources in Jerusalem told Kol Israel there has been no Israeli commitment on that issue.

Among the Israeli Arab prisoners whose release the PA is demanding are the four Arabs who killed three Israeli soldiers with pitchforks on the infamous “Pitchforks Night” in the early ’90s, the terrorist who threw a firebomb into the car belonging to the Moses family, murdering the mother Ofra and her son Tal, and the terrorist who threw a firebomb at a bus, murdering Rachel Weiss, mother of three children, and soldier David Delaroza, in the 1980s.

There were conflicting reports in recent days over whether the sides had achieved a basis for the talks, or whether negotiators would convene only to prepare the basis for talks.

Israeli and Palestinian talks have been suspended since October 2010, when the Palestinians walked out over Israel’s refusal to extend a 10-month settlement construction freeze.
JTA content was used in this report.

First published on CAMERA

Palestinian officials and the public have long pressed for the release of Palestinian prisoners, who are revered as heroes in government-controlled Palestinian media. Over the last several decades, Israel has released thousands of such prisoners, often times as goodwill gestures. This spring, President Mahmoud Abbas has reportedly insisted in talks with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on the release of all Palestinian prisoners, including those convicted of brutal crimes, as a pre-condition for resuming negotiations with Israel.

All too often, mainstream media outlets have whitewashed the terrorist acts and violent crimes of Palestinian prisoners by failing to mention the crimes at all or by falsely minimizing the degree of violence. In some cases, media outlets euphemistically refer to prisoners incarcerated since before 1994 as ”political prisoners,” covering up the atrocities they carried out. CAMERA is the first to publish a detailed list (below), obtained from Israel’s Ministry of Justice, of 118 pre-Oslo Palestinian prisoners, including their names and violent crimes.

The following is a sampling of some of the most egregious examples of the media’s whitewashing of violence on the part of Palestinian prisoners. A portion of them were subsequently corrected following communication from CAMERA or its affiliated sites, BBC Watch and CiF Watch.

Failure to Report the Crime

In several cases, media outlets reported about a prisoner’s detention, or efforts to gain his release, without noting why he is there in the first place. Thus, a Feb. 18, 2013 page-2 photo caption in Ha’aretz, accompanying a large, five-column image stated:

Palestinians in Ramallah yesterday holding placards depicting Samer Issawi, who is jailed in an Israeli prison and has been on hunger strike for 209 days. Palestinians have been protesting on Issawi’s behalf for several days.

As CAMERA reported at the time, Samer Issawi was sentenced to 26 years for attempted murder, belonging to an unrecognized (terror) organization, military training, and possession of weapons, arms and explosive materials. IDF spokesman Eytan Buchman elaborated that Issawi:

… was convicted of severe crimes, which including five attempts of intentional death. This included four shootings, between July 2001 and February 2002, in which Isawi and his partners fired on police cars and buses travelling between Ma’ale Adumim and Jerusalem. In one attack, a policeman was injured and required surgery. On October 30, 2001, Isawi, together with an accomplice, fired at two students walking from the Hebrew University campus to their car in a nearby parking lot. In another case, Isawi provided guns and explosive devices to a squad, who fired on a bus. Finally, in December 2001, Isawi ordered an attack on security personnel at Hebrew University, providing a squad with a pistol and a pipebomb. Two of the squad members tracked security personnel but opted not to execute the attack.

The BBC also consistently failed to report on the full extent of Issawi’s crimes, as well as those of others on hunger strike at the same time. For example, a BBC report from Feb. 18 2013 made no mention whatsoever of the terrorist activities of Samer Issawi, Ayman Sharawna, Tariq Qaadan and Jafar Ezzedine. As BBC Watch reported:

Ayman Sharawna, from Dura near Hebron, was also released under the Shalit deal in October 2011, by which time he had served ten years of a 38 year sentence for attempted murder and bomb-making. Sharawna is a member of the Hebron branch of Hamas and was rearrested on January 31^st 2012 due to violating of the terms of his release by returning to Hamas activities. Shawarna was originally apprehended on May 10^th 2002 when he and another terrorist planted an explosive device near a branch of Bank HaPoalim on HaAtzmaout Street in Be’er Sheva. The device malfunctioned, but despite that eighteen people were injured in the attack. Sharawna and his accomplice were caught fleeing the scene by members of the public and he was also found to have taken part in prior shooting attacks during the second Intifada.

Tariq Qaadan and Jafar Ezzedine are both senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives. In a March 2013 report which was broadcast on several BBC platforms, Jon Donnison showcased a particular prisoner, with the description of the reasons for his imprisonment given in one laconic sentence: “Ammar Ziben is serving 32 life sentences in an Israeli prison for his involvement in bomb attacks in Jerusalem in 1997.”

According to Ziben’s organization – Hamas – there was rather more to Ziben’s “involvement”:

The U.S. State Dept. has filed a motion to dismiss the claims of a group of Americans who allege American aid money to the Palestinian Authority funds terrorism.

The Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act requires the State Department to certify that none of the money is used for terror.

“It is estimated that since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the State Department, via USAID, has given over $4 billion to Palestinians, according to the Israel Law Center (Shurat HaDin). The sum includes U.S. funding to UNRWA, the United Nations body that operates in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The lawsuit, filed by 24 Americans living in Israel last November in the U.S. District Court for Washington, contends that the State Department has ignored Congressional safeguards and transparency requirements which govern financial assistance to the PA.

The Jewish Press and other media have frequently reported that the Palestinian Authority pays fat salaries to its suicide bomb masterminds serving time in Israeli jails, spends money to build monuments to glorify suicide bombers and funds its media to disseminate incitement to terror against Jews. Millions of dollars also are transferred to Hamas, which the State Dept. itself classifies as an illegal terrorist organization.

The attorneys for the U.S. government, who have asked the court not to allow the case to continue, claim that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring this civil action and that the case raises “political questions.”

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs and director of the Israel Law Center explained in a statement Tuesday that the issue is the lack of transparency on the part the officials at Foggy Bottom in Washington.

“Rather than defend the government’s foreign aid policy on its merits and provide proof that it truly knows where taxpayer money to the PA is going, the government’s lawyers are trying to dismiss the lawsuit on legal technicalities,” she said. ”They are saying that it is pure speculation that Americans can be injured by terrorism in Israel and that the issue of funding is a foreign policy power reserved to the U.S. President and cannot be reviewed by the courts.”

Darshan-Leitner added emphasized that the lawsuit does not challenge the Executive Branch’s right to conduct foreign policy but simply want transparency.

“U.S. funds are being utilized by the Palestinians for terrorism which threatens Americans, and the plaintiffs will be responding to this motion and asking that the case be allowed to go forward,” Darshan-Leitner stressed.

The Department of Justice has declined to comment on the case when asked to do buy the Washington Free Beacon.

Hundreds of Palestinian Authority security prisoners rioted while terrorists out of jail attacks Israelis with rocks and firebombs Tuesday following the death of a cancer-stricken terrorist serving a life sentence for helping to plan a suicide bombing.

The Palestinian Authority officially blamed Israel for the “brutal” death of Maysara Abu Hamdiyeh, 64, who died after being transferred from his Negev prison cell to Be’er Sheva’s Soroka Medical Center late last month for medical care.

Six prison guards and three prisoners were injured during riots, and Arabs in Abu Hamdiyeh’s home city of Hevron went on a rampage, throwing rocks and hurling firebombs at police and soldiers.

Abu Hamdiyeh was sentenced to life in 2002 for organizing a Fatah suicide attack at the Kafit coffee shop in Jerusalem, where approximately 50 people were spared death or injury when the bomber’s explosive charge failed to detonate.

“The Palestinian presidency holds the government of Netanyahu responsible for the martyrdom of prisoner Abu Hamdiyeh today in the prisons of the Israeli occupation,” according to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina.

Just to make certain there is no doubt concerning the gravity of Israel’s supposed guilt, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) called it a “premeditated crime against humanity.”

Palestinian Authority Minister for Prisoner Affairs Issa Qaraqe charged Israel with causing his death, which he said “is a brutal crime…especially that the prison administration knew that he was suffering from cancer and they didn’t release him and medically neglected him.”

An Israeli prisoner spokeswoman said that Abu Hamdiyeh was diagnosed in February with esophagus cancer, which was not diagnosed as terminal until last week. She added that the Prisons Service “appealed to the release committee to secure his early release, a process which had been started but not yet concluded.”

The cancer-stricken terrorist recently complained to lawyers that he was only receiving pain killers and was not treated for his condition while in jail.

Hamas called for a new intifada against Israel, but the call was unnecessary considering the violent reaction to Abu Hamdiyeh’s death. The Bethlehem-based Ma’an news agency noted that he was the 207th Palestinian Authority prisoner to die in jail, an implication that Israel is to be blamed for deaths of terrorists, even those who suffer from cancer.

Other jailed Palestinian Authority terrorists are risking their lives through hunger strikes, and one of them, Samer al-Issawi, is being cared for in an Israeli hospital, where he reportedly is in critical condition. He had been freed from jail in the swap of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit in return for 1,000 terrorists but was re-arrested for violating terms of the agreement.

If he dies, Israel also will be blamed for his starving himself to death.