On two separate occasions this past week rockets were fired from south Lebanon at Israel. On August 4, 2021, three rockets were fired at the region of Qiryat Shemonah, Israel's northernmost city. In response Israel fired artillery at the launch sites. The rocket fire this past week was the outcome of the increasing tension along the Israel-Lebanon border. Read more...
On July 6, 2021, a ceremony was held in the headquarters of the PA post office bank in Ramallah, attended by the Palestinian minister of communications, inaugurating a new method that will enable the PA to make its monthly payments to Palestinian terrorist prisoners, the wounded and the families of shaheeds. Payments will now be made through ATMs which will be distributed to post office branches in Judea and Samaria. Read more...
On June 29 and 30, 2021, the Ramallah branch of the al-Quds Open University held a conference sponsored by Mahmoud Abbas. It was the first conference on "The Zionist Narrative Between Deconstruction and Destructuring," part of a larger program called "Deconstructing the Zionist Narrative," conducted by the University and Fatah social organizations (al-Quds Open University website in Arabic, July 5, 2021). Read more...
After two months of talks, a vaccine exchange deal was negotiated between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Israel committed to giving the PA more than a million doses of vaccines whose expiration date was approaching, and in October 2021 would receive from Pfizer the same number of doses, which had initially been earmarked for the PA. On June 18, 2021, when the first batch of doses was delivered, the PA cancelled the deal and returned the vaccines to Israel. The delivery apparently revealed the existence of the deal, causing a disagreement in the PA between PA Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh and Hussein al-Sheikh, minister of civilian affairs, as well as extreme criticism of the government, and leading the PA to cancel the deal the deal. Read more...
On the morning of May 12, 2021, the IDF attacked a location in the western part of Gaza City where senior Hamas figures had gathered, including Bassem Issa, brigade commander in Hamas' military-terrorist wing. Fourteen people were killed, all of them Hamas operatives, some of them holding high-ranking positions. One was Dr. Jamal al-Zebda, who held a PhD in mechanical engineering. He studied in the United States and was a senior lecturer in the IUG's engineering faculty. He also developed weapons for Hamas' military wing and headed the rocket development program under the direct supervision of Muhammad al-Deif, the commander of the military wing. Jamal al-Zebda tutored an entire generation of engineers at the IUG, recruited many of them to the Izz al-Din Qassam Brigades' weapons' development program, especially the aspects dealing with rockets and UAVs (al-Akhbar, May 22, 2021). His son, Usama al-Zebda (who held American citizenship), also an engineer, joined him in serving Hamas. He was killed in the same attack. Read more...
Recently, during the “Guardian of the Walls” operation in Gaza (May 10th – May 21st), there was a massive attack on mainstream social media and messaging platforms against Israelis and pro-Israelis. Those attacks led to aggressive spamming of pro-Israeli content and also to suspension or blocking of accounts. From an extensive web research, we found that the source of these social media attacks comes mostly from the Malaysian arena, organized and led by a network of Malaysian anti-Israel organizations and groups, with tremendous exposure online of hundreds of thousands of views and followers Read more...
