Retired Tel Aviv District Court Judge Nissim Yeshaya has announced he is quitting as an appeals court judge, two days after he publicly stated in court, “There are some girls who enjoy being raped.”

He made the comment during an appeal by a 19-year-old Israeli who was raped by Arabs at the age of 13 and was appealing a Defense Ministry decision not to recognize the attack as an act of terrorism.

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and Supreme Court President Asher Grunis spoke with Judge Yeshaya about his outburst and accepted his resignation.

“The judge announced his resignation, and this is the correct and only step in this grave incident,” Livni said.

“This is the only way to restore public trust in the judicial system,” she added. “Every judge needs to know that his being examined, correctly, under a magnifying glass and that he must conduct himself correctly as one who is guarding justice and who determines the fate of others.

“We are not speaking only about a comment but about a view that women have been struggling with for years that throws on them the guilt as victims of rape. This kind of expression from a judge is liable unintentionally to give twisted minds legitimacy to rape.

Judges also need to know that when a woman says, “No,” she means ‘No.’”

The terrorists who are building up men and material resources in the chaos of today’s Egyptian Sinai struck again this morning. Two GRAD rockets were fired into – and struck – the southern Israeli resort city of Eilat.

Memo to those lacking historical, geographic or political background: Eilat is not and never has been claimed by Palestinian Arab terror apologists as “occupied territory”… other than by the many extremists who see all of Israel as the territory that is occupied. The readers of the Lebanese Al Manar news website for instance, are seeing a report at this moment headlined “Rockets Hit Occupied Town of Eilat“; Al Manar is a mouthpiece of Hezbollah. The semi-respectable Palestinian Maan News Agency has called Eilat occupied too, though never in the English language.

Times of Israel is reporting that one of the two missiles crashed into a residential neighborhood; the other in an open area on Eilat’s outskirts. Reuters says both hit open areas. Ynet says there were three rockets, and two landed in residential areas. Israel’s Army Radio, which is broadcast throughout the country, is quoted saying that a rocket “had also hit the nearby Jordanian city of Aqaba, but a spokesman for the Jordanian Civil Defense denied the suggestion.”

Fortunately, and this is a matter of divine intervention and human failure, no injuries are reported, at least  not so far. Damage is said to be light.

The IDF’s assessment, hardly surprising and certainly not for the first time, is that the attack on Eilat was made from the nearby Sinai Peninsula. The situation there is chaotic and dangerous, and growing steadily worse; we have written numerous times about Sinai’s spiral downwards into terrorist-driven anarchy [here, here, here and hereamong numerous other posts]. As a matter of consistent policy, the Egyptian authorities always respond to media inquiries with firm denials that rockets were fired from Egyptian territory; this morning they did the same again.

Israel’s security authorities saw today’s attack coming. An Iron Dome anti-missile defense battery has been stationed near Eilat for the past two weeks; there are ongoing intelligence assessments that warned of an act of terrorism like this morning’s. The system however was not utilized today, presumably because the Iron Dome controller knows to compute the expected damage in real time and to avoid firing if it is reasonable to do that.

The IDF created the Eilat Regional Brigade this past December to provide military protection, to the extent such a thing is doable against a jihadist enemy operating under the cover of a neighboring country’s government. The most recent rocket attack on Eilat’s civilian population (the only kind that it has) was an especially worrying one in August 2012; those which came before it are detailed in this Wikipedia entry.

Visit This Ongoing War.

On Friday evening, an 18 year old Arab from the village of Idhna (near Hebron) was caught infiltrating into the town of Efrat in Gush Etzion.

When he was caught by the town’s security personnel, he was carrying a Hamas flag and 3 lighters on his person.

During the interrogation he said he planned to commit a terror attack. There is speculation he was sent to test out the town’s security response.

On Saturday, the IDF arrested two Arabs in Hebron who threw stones at a Jewish boy, in Hebron’s Jewish Quarter.

In what the Israeli police are now calling a nationalistic (terror) attack, an Arab taxi driver drove into a border policeman at the Oz police station near Jaabel Mukaber in Jerusalem (the Armon HaNatziv neighborhood).

The taxi driver (39) from Jaabel Mukaber drove up to the police station gate and hit a delivery truck that was parked nearby. The border policeman at the gate then approached the taxi driver who quickly reversed and then drove forward right into the border policeman.

Three other policemen at the station then pulled their guns and shot the driver, lightly wounding him in the leg.

MDA treated both the policeman and the driver.

Police closed all the roads near Armon Hanatziv.