Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — The families of 132 Israeli hostages being held by Hamas on Tuesday held a protest march in an attempt to disrupt the transfer of aid to Gaza, calling on Israel to halt the flow of aid until their loved ones are freed. “What do we get in return? We think that if we’re talking humanitarian [matters], this aid should be in exchange for our hostages,” said Carmit Itzhaki, whose niece Eden Yerushalmi, 24, was abducted from the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7. “Hamas was under pressure to bring in supplies and therefore went along wit...
(JNS) - The Startup Nation meets the Bible. Israeli technology that measures the Earth's magnetic field has verified an ancient narrative, researchers said on Thursday. A new study scientifically corroborates the conquest of the Philistine city of Gath by Hazael, king of Aram-Damasus, as described in 2 Kings 12:17. The breakthrough technology, which was achieved by researchers at four Israeli universities, enables archaeologists to identify burnt materials discovered in excavations and estimate...
(JNS) — Israel’s Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked the government’s “recusal law“—an amendment to Israel’s Basic Law: The Government—from taking effect until after new elections are held. In its 6-5 ruling, the Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, argued the law was “clearly a personal amendment” meant to shield Netanyahu from the consequences of violating a 2020 conflict of interest agreement, and therefore constituted an illegitimate abuse of the Knesset’s power to pass Basic Laws. The delay was supported by former c...
(JNS) - Hamas terrorists murdered about 100 members of Kibbutz Be'eri and visitors on Oct. 7. Of the 30 who were kidnapped from their homes, 19 have been released and the body of Judith Weiss was recovered. As of this moment, 10 kibbutz members are still being held hostage in the Gaza Strip. Members of Be'eri who returned from Hamas captivity, returned to the devastated kibbutz this week to pay their respects to their neighbors and friends who were murdered or are still being held hostage. Oren...
Soldiers serving in Gaza are experiencing unusual infections, including severe foot fungus, Yedioth Ahronoth has reported. Long campaigns with soldiers standing sometimes for hours at a time, and the compromised hygiene in Gaza have increased the risk of serious foot and leg conditions. Medical staff report many reservists are suffering from painful lesions on the feet and legs. Soldiers may not take off their shoes or change their socks for many days which also raises the risks of infections. In addition, many soldiers in Gaza complain of...
(JNS) — Israel accused the United Nations on Wednesday of not doing enough to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Defense Ministry agency responsible for civilian affairs in the territories, responded to a tweet by United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini blaming Jerusalem for subjecting Gazans to “collective punishment with too little humanitarian aid allowed in.” The agency tweeted...
(JNS) - The Israel Defense Forces are investigating a possible terrorist tunnel that soldiers discovered near Jewish communities in the Hebron Hills in Judea. In a viral video shared to social media earlier this week, an IDF reservist claims that "after a long period in which residents of Telem and Adora in the West Hebron Hills heard digging noises," troops were sent to inspect Palestinian structures in the area of Khirbet Tayibe. "To our surprise, in addition to illegal construction, we found...
By Eliyahu Freedman TEL AVIV (JTA) — Daniel Ozeri found himself returning to the worst moments of his life on a recent Sunday — not inside his own mind, but inside a Tel Aviv convention center. Ozeri was in Expo Tel Aviv, a sprawling complex in the city’s north where the Nova music festival — which ended when Hamas attacked on Oct. 7 — has been recreated in exacting detail. At least 364 party-goers were murdered and 40 taken hostage at the festival on Kibbutz Re’im, which quickly became a powerful symbol of Israel’s loss. Ozeri, like so many ot...
(JNS) — Arabs vandalized an archaeological site in Israel’s biblical heartland that millions of Jews and Christians revere as the location where Joshua built an altar, an Israeli NGO said on Thursday. The reports of renewed damage to the site on Mount Ebal known as Joshua’s Altar, which is under joint control with the Palestinian Authority, highlights anew the need for the preservation, upkeep and safeguarding of Israeli archaeological sites in P.A.-controlled areas after decades of neglect. Isr...
(JNS) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited troops in the northern Gaza Strip, during which he said that the war against Hamas is not nearly finished. "We are not stopping; we are continuing to battle. We will be intensifying the fighting in the coming days, as this will be a long war. It is not close to over," Netanyahu told soldiers. "We are proud of you and trust you. We see the determination and the desire to continue until the end," he added. Netanyahu was joined by Israel...
(JNS) - Two Israeli reserve soldiers recently discovered a small, well-preserved Byzantine-era oil lamp at a military staging area in southern Israel near the Gaza border, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced on Tuesday. The find, by Nathaniel Melchior and Alon Segev, part of the 404th Battalion within the Israel Defense Forces' 282nd Fire Brigade, sparked a chain of events that led to the 1,500-year-old artifact's safe handover to the IAA. "During one of our wanderings in the field, I...
(JNS) — South American and African countries have already expressed interest in taking in Palestinian Arab refugees from the Gaza Strip in return for monetary compensation, Likud Knesset member Danny Danon said on Monday. Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, who has floated the idea of the transfer of Gazans as part of his five-point plan for the post-war period, told Israeli broadcaster Kan Reshet Bet that Israel should “make it easier” on those Palestinians who wish to leave the Strip for other countries. Danon noted that Ca...
(JNS) — A group representing some 60,000 evacuees from northern Israel is calling on the Biden administration to back a military campaign to push Hezbollah away from the border. Lobby 1701 is named after the U.N. Security Council Resolution that ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War and mandated that the Iranian terrorist proxy stay north of the Litani River, which is around 18 miles from the Israeli border. The Lebanese Shi’ite group has entrenched itself along the border in violation of the resolution. Lobby 1701 argues in its letter to the Ame...
(JNS) — An Olympic champion who won Israel’s first-ever world gold in gymnastics is auctioning off the medal to raise money for the Gaza border communities devastated in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists. Artem Dolgopyat, 26, won the 2023 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships on floor exercise in Belgium on the very day of the massacre, when thousands of Hamas terrorists burst into southern Israel and overran nearly two dozen Israeli communities, murdering 1,200 people, most civilians, abducting 240 others to Gaza and laying waste to the...
(JNS) — Shai DeLuca, a Canadian-Israeli interior designer, won a defamation suit on Dec. 22 against an anti-Israel Toronto restaurant owner who called him a terrorist and killer. “As much as this was my personal suit against Foodbenders, and Kim Hawkins, the win is a collective win and belongs to the Jewish community as a whole,” he told JNS. “What we are witnessing—the trampling through the streets of Western countries—is reminiscent of Europe in the 1930s. Instead of ‘Sieg Heil,’ we’re...
By (JNS) — An investigative report published earlier this month purports to show that senior Israeli and American officials had in hand financial intelligence showing the flow of tens of millions of dollars to Hamas and failed to act on it. That funding, the report alleges, helped Hamas pay for its military infrastructure, laying the foundation for its Oct. 7 massacre. As Israel now looks to take apart Hamas piece by piece militarily, there is a renewed focus on disrupting its funding. Erel Margalit, Israeli hi-tech entrepreneur and former m...
(World Israel News) — In an address to a Knesset hearing Monday attended by families of hostages, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described how an International Red Cross Representative told him “no” when he asked her to deliver crucial medicine to hostages. “I met with the Red Cross; I handed over a box of medicine for some of the hostages. Some of them really need it.” He continued, “I told a representative to take this box to Rafah; she said no. It was a difficult conversation.” When describing the difficulties with the Red Cross...
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his preconditions for peace with Gaza in a Monday op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, saying, “Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.” “These are the three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza,” Netanyahu wrote. The outline for a peace agreement came as Israel pushed its ground offensive farther into Gaza in its campaign to destroy the Hamas terrorist group. The counter-o...
(JNS) — Hamas used a flammable, suffocating gas that causes a loss of consciousness within minutes of exposure to flush out and kill female IDF observers (“tazpaniot“) from the Israeli army’s Nahal Oz command center on Oct. 7. Families of IDF observers received a harrowing minute-by-minute briefing from a reserve officer after an army investigation into the final moments of their loved ones, Channel 12 reported on Tuesday. The main revelation was that terrorists threw a deadly substance into the communications room, one that causes suffoca...
(JNS) — Israeli soldiers fought Hamas terrorists operating inside two United Nations schools in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday. The military said the terrorists were hiding inside the Al Rafaa and Zavaha schools in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City. “This is further evidence that Hamas uses the civilian population and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip as human shields for its terrorist activity,” added the IDF. The use of the sacks belonging to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency raises further questions about its role in supporting Hamas...
(JTA) — Two Israeli-Americans missing since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel have been confirmed killed, their kibbutz announced. Judith Weinstein, 70, a member of Kibbutz Nir Oz, was fatally wounded during the terrorist invasion of southern Israel, Nir Oz said. The statement confirmed her death but did not say if she had died the same day. Last week, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a volunteer group that represents Israelis held captive by Hamas, said Weinstein’s husband, Gadi Haggai, 72, had been killed. Their bodies are being hel...
The Wilfrid Israel Memorial was never intended to be an interpretive memorial for the Gaza War. Yet, for some, it has become just that, the first De-Facto Gaza Memorial in Israel. The Gaza War — an unwanted, terrible war that necessitated Jews to rush into the fire to save Jews. The Wilfrid Israel Memorial, adjacent to the ancient Levite City of Tel Yokneam, was conceived and funded by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation. It is the creative work of noted Jerusalem artist Sam Ph...
(JNS) - Iris Haim on Wednesday told the Israeli soldiers who accidentally killed her son in the Gaza Strip on Oct. 15 that she doesn't blame them for the tragedy. "I wanted to tell you that I love you very much and I know that what happened is not your fault, it is the fault of no one except Hamas, may their names and memory be erased from the earth," she said in an audio message which has been distributed on social media. Her 28-year-old son, Yotam, along with Alon Shamriz and Samer Fouad...
(JNS) — Israel Defense Forces soldiers have recovered the body of hostage Elia Toledano, the IDF announced on Friday morning. The body of the 28-year-old Toledano was identified by medical and rabbinical officials as well as the Israel Police. The IDF did not indicate how or when he died. Hours later, the military announced that forces operating in Gaza retrieved the bodies of two more Israeli hostages: Cpl. Nik Beizer, 19, and Sgt. Ron Sherman, 19. Toledano was taken captive at the Supernova music festival at Kibbutz Reim. More than 360 p...
(JNS) — The city of Sderot is located less than a mile from the Gaza Strip. Some 90 percent of the town’s 30,000 residents fled on Oct. 7 after Hamas invaded southern Israel. My wife’s cousin Ilan is currently stationed with his IDF infantry unit in what was until recently a Sderot elementary school. The happy, high-pitched yelping of children has been replaced by the metallic sounds of assault rifles being taken apart, cleaned and reassembled by soldiers. We were visiting Ilan’s family in Nahariya, Israel’s northernmost coastal city, whe...
