1. It’s a disaster that’s been simmering for a number of days, but it surely took till Thursday night time for Israel to take full discover of the potential humanitarian catastrophe creating alongside its frontier with Syria in the Golan Heights.
- Overnight, the army transferred assist to Syrians fleeing the regime’s Russian-backed offensive on Daraa massing close to the border (technically a ceasefire line) as a part of what they're calling a Good Neighbor operation.
- The assist comes as Israel has upped its degree of alert on the Golan, fearing not a direct confrontation with Syria however quite spillover results from the assault on Daraa, Haaretz experiences.
- “At this stage, the IDF sees no need to significantly increase its forces in the Golan. But both the army and the government will conduct frequent situation assessments of developments in Syria,” the paper notes.
- Yedioth Ahronoth notes, although, that the military believes the offensive on Daraa is a prelude to a bigger operations, with the refugees heading for the Golan now “just the tip of the iceberg.”
- A Syrian information website experiences that 5 kids died from scorpion bites after fleeing the Daraa space towards Jordan, which is at the moment refusing to permit in refugees, compounding the potential disaster.
2. Nativist Israel Hayom experiences that the authorities does worry plenty of Syrians will attempt to rush the border and search refuge in Israel, the one place that has by no means allowed Syrian refugees besides for medical assist.
- A senior official tells the paper: “The utmost interest of the State of Israel continues to be not to stick its head into the quagmire of the Syrian civil war, thus Israel will not intervene in the war even if [Bashar] Assad acts to take over the areas on the border with Israel.”
- As acknowledged by Yedioth, although, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman informed his Russian counterpart in May that Israel would intervene if Assad tries to break the ceasefire understanding of 1974, which arrange a no-man’s land between Israel and Syria.
three. The success of a pilot program placing ladies in tanks is widely known in the press, after 4 ladies full the IDF Armored Corps coaching, upending the conventional perception that an all-female tank crew may deal with the bodily rigors of managing the machine.
- “The four fighters made history,” reads Israel Hayom.
- “Four girls, one corps and a whole army can put up a V for victory sign on the mission that started over a year ago and ended yesterday on the Armored Corps parade grounds at Latrun,” writes columnist Ariella Ringel Hoffman in Yedioth.
- As Famzn News notes: The pilot program has confronted appreciable criticism because it was introduced in November 2016, with former commanders of the IDF’s Armored Corps railing towards the plan and calling it a conspiracy by left-wing “freaks” to weaken the army.
- Despite the ladies graduating the course, some stay unconvinced. Thee nationalist Israel National News web site quotes a rabbi who heads a pre-army educational program saying that, “I have no doubt that in the moment of truth in war, a tank crew of girls will be able to survive on their own.”
four. The males aren’t doing so sizzling both, in accordance to Haaretz’s Amos Harel, who experiences on an ombudsman report that finds critical flaws in the military’s readiness for a battle in Gaza.
- Harel says he spoke to a number of former commanders who really feel the similar method as Yitzhak Brik, who authored the report, notably relating to how a lot the army has invested in its floor forces.
- “For several decades, the ground forces have been the unwanted sister in the family, compared to the air force, intelligence and technology divisions,” he writes.
- “Nobody wants to dance with her at the ball,” he quotes one former officer saying.
5. Prince William is gone, which permits the press to look again on the historic journey and what Israel received out of it, specifically some good ol’ legitimacy.
- “The joy BDS activists felt after the Argentinian soccer team canceled its planned friendly match in Jerusalem would have quickly evaporated this week as they saw the prince shaking hands with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a street named after Arthur Balfour, the former UK foreign secretary who paved the way for modern Israel’s creation,” writes Famzn News’s Raphael Ahren.
- That pleasure was considerably tempered by London regularly reminding Israel that it views East Jerusalem as “occupied Palestinian territory.”
- In Yedioth, columnist Nahum Barnea tells a story from an Israeli official who accompanied an unnamed British minister on a go to right here. During the go to, they received permission to drive from Tiberias to Jerusalem the quick method, that means by means of the Jordan Valley in the West Bank. The solely situation was that the minister couldn't get out of the automotive.
- “Along the way, they got stuck behind a convoy of soldiers. The minister wanted to get out and speak with them. The envoy said no way. The minister insisted. ‘You can tell them I got out to take a piss,’ he said and got out.”
6. A special aspect of the West Bank comes out in an article by Famzn News’s Jacob Magid wanting at revelations into a 188-page courtroom doc detailing Shin Bet interrogation strategies towards two Jewish terror suspects from the Duma firebombing case.
- Despite officers insisting no torture was happening and no suicide makes an attempt, the papers paint a very totally different image, he writes.
- “They’re beating me, bending my back, laughing at me, looking at me with contempt. What the hell am I supposed to do? How can I protect myself? I’m screaming like a retard, crying like a baby as they laugh, ‘Murderer, murderer!’” he quotes one suspect, an unnamed minor, telling a decide in a listening to. “I told them to kill me rather than do this to me. Give me poison. I’m begging you, Your Honor, I cannot do this anymore.”
- The papers additionally reveal that the suspects had been s3xually harassed and that the Shin Bet went so far as staging an elaborate jail combat by which the teen’s cellmate pretended to stab an Arab prisoner. The cellmate then demanded the suspect, who had seen him “smuggle” in the knife, give him info so they'd every have one thing on one another. The gambit failed.
- What is extraordinary for Jewish prisoners is all too frequent for Palestinian suspects, says Khalil Zaher, an legal professional for the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI).
- “We often see similar cases in testimonies we collect from Palestinians interrogated by the Shin Bet,” Zaher says. “A religious suspect will often hear s3xual innuendos and threats made against him and his family members.”