By ISRAEL KASNETT (JNS) – In an address to the U.N. General Assembly last September, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas pledged to a sympathetic gathering of world leaders that he would hold parliamentary elections. While the announcement garnered international headlines at the time, little progress has been made in the ensuing months towards elections, highlighting what experts see as entrenched […]

By JUDY LASH BALINT (JNS) – Israel is the home of Walter Bingham, 95, certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest living radio-talk show host. At a gathering in his honor in Jerusalem, hosted by the Israel Government Press Office on the last night of Chanukah, Bingham told journalists, friends and family members that he feels that the […]

By MARCY OSTER JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s Defense Ministry has recognized as a terror attack an incident in which a Palestinian mother of nine was killed by a thrown rock at her car. But since the woman, Aisha Rabi, is not an Israeli citizen, her family will not receive compensation from the National Insurance Institute, Ynet reported. Rabi, 47, was […]

By JOSEFIN DOLSTEN TEANECK, N.J. (JTA) – Jason Greenblatt, Donald Trump’s former Middle East negotiator, made his first public speech since leaving the White House on Sunday night, Jan. 12. Greenblatt, 52, who worked as a lawyer for Trump for two decades prior to joining the administration, spoke at Congregation Keter Torah in Teaneck, N.J., the modern Orthodox synagogue where […]

(JNS) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a letter to an Israeli-American woman imprisoned in Russia on drug charges, promising to do everything in his power to secure her release. “We are here in Israel, and you are in Russia, but the distance between us is bridged by the closeness of our hearts,” Netanyhu wrote in the letter, a […]

By MARCY OSTER JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi is under fire for calling immigrants from the former Soviet Union “Communist, religion-hating” Gentiles. At a recent rabbinical conference in Jerusalem, Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef criticized Israel’s Law of Return for granting citizenship to Russians who are not Jewish according to Orthodox religious law, the Yediot Acharonot daily first reported Tuesday, […]

By YAAKOV LAPPIN (JNS) – Despite the substantial blow absorbed by Iran due to the Jan. 3 assassination of the Quds Force commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, by U.S. military forces, the regime is set to continue its expansion program to dominate the region, Israeli observers have assessed. “No one can dispute the fact that Qassem Soleimani was undoubtedly not […]

  By Benjamin Kerstein The Algemeiner – Israel’s Defense Ministry announced on Wednesday that a breakthrough has been made in using laser beams to thwart aerial attacks. According to Israel’s Channel 13, the technological development will enable the long-range targeting and stabilization of laser beams, allowing them to intercept targets at great distances. To read the complete story, please click here.

Israel Hayom (via JNS) – Much has been said about the complex defense and security challenges Israel faces as a Jewish state in the Middle East. Being the sole democracy in one of the toughest neighborhoods on the planet means that Israel must employ various means to achieve and sustain its national security goals, as well as create and maintain […]

Israel Hayom (via JNS) – An Israeli military court recently convicted the Khalil Jabarin, 18, for the 2018 murder of Israeli-American Ari Fuld. The court at the Ofer military base convicted Jabarin on a charge of voluntary manslaughter, the court’s equivalent of murder. Fuld was stabbed in the back by the then-16-year-old Jabarin at the shopping center at the Gush Etzion […]