Rocket alert sirens blare across the country – including Be’er Sheva, Tel Aviv, Binyamin and the Sharon Plains; house hit in Mateh Yehuda Regional Council, none hurt.

Yoav Zitun, YNET

Latest Update: 07.08.14, 22:36

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Rockets fired from the Gaza Strip kept pushing northward on Tuesday night when the rocket alert siren was blared in Caesarea. It was followed by a volley of about 30 rockets fired at different areas of the country.

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By HERB KEINON,YAAKOV LAPPIN, JPOST
08/07/2014
Prime minister says “Hamas chose to escalate the situation and it will pay a heavy price for doing so”; preparations underway for further call up of reservists.

Following high level security deliberations Tuesday morning Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu decided to expand the military operation in Gaza, including beginning preparations for a ground operation.

The deliberations took place following a Monday night rocket barrage on Israel and the feeling in Jerusalem that Hamas is interested in escalation.

No time limit was put on the operation but senior diplomatic officials said it could be “for a long time.”
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By ILYA MEYER, TOI,   July 7, 2014, 5:32 pm

Israel Commentary

US Funding the PA is a Problem
By Sharona Whisler
June 30, 2014

II Senator Rand Paul sticks up for Israel
By Katie Glueck

The problem is that US taxpayer money is provided to the Palestinian Authority and the PA has a consistent history of funding terrorism. And while aiding and abetting terrorism is a federal offense, the US hasn’t halted its $600 million annual contribution to the PA even since its newly formed government with Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza and which calls in its Charter (Article 7) for the global murder of Jews and celebrates the recent kidnapping of three Israeli yeshiva students.

Partnering with a terrorist organization like Hamas shows the PA’s true colors. However, even if the PA-Hamas partnership ended tomorrow, taxpayer money is still falling into the wrong hands because the PA is granted it unconditionally. That means that the PA can do whatever it wants without fear that US aid will be withheld.

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BY HERB KEINON, JPOST

The security cabinet met Monday for the fourth time in eight days, amid the continuous pounding of the western Negev from the Gaza Strip.

The price of not undertaking an operation in Gaza might well be higher than the price of the operation, former MI chief warns.

By Yaakov Lappin, JPOST

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His aloofness from the three families during the search exposed a callousness toward Israel which goes far beyond the episodic Netanyahu-Barack follies.

By Gil Troy,   JPOST

The sickening news started filling my inbox during a family dinner. The three boys had become three bodies. “Not for publication yet,” my first source warned; I chose not to announce the news because I still wasn’t ready to bury my hopes for those kids. Half an hour later, my teenage son glanced at his ever-pinging cellphone and shared the bad news. My slightly prolonged denial didn’t ease the pain. I still had that constricted feeling in the chest so many of us have felt for 18 days, the recurring pit in the stomach that members of the three families now will never lose.

It is strange to mourn for three kids you never met from families you don’t know. But that’s what community is all about, especially Jewish community, and most especially the Israeli community. Our parallel lives, shared values and common fate bind us. Beyond the altruism and transcendent tribalism, we all know it could have been one of our kids. Naftali, Gil-Ad, and Eyal were not strangers; they are us. Read more…

— no “Death of Klinghoffer” agitprop at the Met

DAN FRIEDMAN

Coming attractions. Here is a link to a video with highlights from the Death of Klinghoffer, a piece of pro-PLO, anti-Zionist propaganda masquerading as an opera. It’s only six-minutes long. I urge you to watch it and forward the link to your lists. We need to tell the cloistered tone deaf morons at the renowned Metropolitan Opera that we won’t stand for this anti-Semitic garbage playing in our neighborhood.

BY EDITOR

PLEASE TAKE A FEW MINUTES TO SEE AND SHARE THIS NEW VIDEO AND

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Transcript of ZOA President Morton Klein addressing Knesset:

First of all, I want to say many things have been said about Mike Huckabee. I want to say that I’m honored to be his friend and I would argue that Mike Huckabee is the greatest friend of Israel of any of the major political figures of America and I’ll go further and say if Mike Huckabee was a member of the Knesset, he’d be the Knesset’s greatest friend in Israel.

ZOA President Klein addressing Knesset about the importance of language in fighting Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS)

I hear this nonsense about, “Well, I have nothing against Jews, it’s just the Jewish state that I have something against.” What I would like to say, could I ever possibly say, “I have nothing against the Italians, but I think that Italy should be destroyed.” Do you think, maybe, I have hostility toward Italians because I’m calling for Italy to be destroyed? Well, of course, I do. This is the type of rubbish that we need to endure.
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By Chemi Shalev, HAARETZ
[…]

Baker, 84, may have mellowed a bit over the years. He told Akiva Eldar in a 2011 Haaretz interview that President Obama should have been tougher with Israel about a settlements freeze, but says today that “pressure is not particularly helpful with Israel. I don’t know how you force a sovereign nation to do something that it sees as very much against its own interest. You can’t force-feed a peace plan, either to Israel or to the Palestinians.”

In Baker’s view, the famous head to head confrontation between the Bush administration and then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir over the $10 billion loan guarantees for immigrant absorption was not meant to press Jerusalem for peace concessions but to stand up to threats to bypass the executive branch and undermine its authority. “We did not do that because we were trying to bring the parties together – which ultimately we were successful in doing – but because Shamir told me ‘If you don’t give us these loan guarantees, we’ll get them from Congress. We won’t pay attention to you, the executive branch of your government, we’ll do it with your legislative branch.’”

You can still hear faint echoes of Baker’s outraged reaction to Shamir’s stand; “We said, ‘Wait a minute, you’re damn well not going to do that. You can’t go around the President of the United States.’. We had to knock it down, and we did.”

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Suspects reenact murder as Prime Minister Netanyahu calls father of Mohammad Abu Khdeir, denouncing the murder.

Attila Somfalvi, Omri Efraim, Itay Blumental, YNET

Three of the six suspects confressed to the murder of Mohammad Abu Khdeir from Shuafat and reenacted it in the area his body was dumped in the forest outside Jerusalem on Monday.

The mother of one of the six suspects, whose son may or may not be one of the three to confess, told Ynet: “We’re shattered and this thing is very difficult for us. My son has nothing to do with this and he will go free. This is crazy because he’s only 16.”

Six suspects in the murder of the 16-year-old from Shuafat were arrested on Sunday morning. The Petah Tikva Magistrate’s Court extended the remand of five of the six suspected in the kidnapping and murder of Abu Khdeir in eight days, despite the fact police sought a 15-days extension. The remand of the sixth suspect was extended in five days.

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After rising tensions between the two, the foreign minister informs the PM that he is dissolving Likud Beiteinu, taking his party back to independent status within coalition.

Moran Azulay

National Review Online

Via Reuters:

The U.S. military said it had grounded the entire fleet of 97 Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jets until completion of additional inspections of the warplane’s single engine built by Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies Corp.
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Egypt’s President says he opposes a referendum on the independence of Iraq’s Kurdish region.

By Arutz Sheva Staff

Arab taxi driver confesses to murder of Afula teenager ‘for nationalistic reasons’; reconstructs the act.

By Gil Ronen and Ari Soffer, INN

Murderers are murderers, whether Jew or Arab. Their lawyers will try to diminish the nature of the crime by arguing grievance. But that is not the issue here.The PA and Hamas share responsibility for the murder of the three Jewish boys because they glorify killers and encourage the killing of Jews. The same cannot be said of Israel. Israel never advocates murder or hate and so is not complicit in the murder of the Arab boy. Israel, in no way bears responsibility. The fact that Israel refused to knuckle under Arab demands and American pressure to “make peace” changes nothing. Ted Belman

‘Apparently the people arrested in relation to the case belong to an extremist Jewish group,’ an official told AFP.

By Tova Dvorin, INN