Netanyahu: Israel will strike any threat, anywhere
(JNS) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself, amid heightened regional tensions following a missile attack near Ben-Gurion Airport attributed to Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen.
“There is one principle that guides me: Israel will defend itself — anywhere, against any threat, with its own forces,” said Netanyahu in a video statement published on social media. His comments came hours after Israeli fighter jets struck Yemen’s Sanaa International Airport, reportedly rendering it inoperable.
The Israel Defense Forces confirmed that the strike was a direct response to Sunday’s Houthi missile attack, which targeted Israel’s main international airport.
Pulitzer awarded to extremist Palestinian poet
(JNS) — Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet and author, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary on May 5. Shortly afterward, it came to light that he had made public statements denigrating the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre.
Abu Toha received the Pulitzer for essays in The New Yorker “on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel,” the Pulitzer site said.
Although the award committee appeared to have failed to uncover Abu Toha’s extremism, by the next day, HonestReporting, a media watchdog group, revealed he had spread virulent anti-Israel “content and fake news” on his social media platforms.
Half of Gazans say Hamas did the right thing on Oct. 7
(JNS) — Half of Gaza’s residents, or some 1.1 million Palestinians, believe that Hamas’s decision to carry out the Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border massacre in Israel was “correct,” according to an opinion poll published by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) this week.
The center, based in the Palestinian Authority city of Ramallah in Samaria, surveyed a representative sample of 1,270 people across Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip on May 1-4. (The survey’s margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, the organization said.)
The poll came as the Israeli government approved “Operation Gideon’s Chariot” to defeat Hamas and bring about the release of the remaining 59 hostages, held by the terrorist organization for more than 570 days.
Israel shuts six UNRWA schools in Jerusalem
(JNS) — Israel on Thursday shut down six UNRWA schools that were illegally operating in eastern Jerusalem, the Ministry of Education said.
The move followed a closure notice issued to the schools last month and the Knesset’s decision in October to ban UNRWA from operating within its territory, and for state officials to cooperate with it, over the U.N.’s Palestinian aid agency’s ties to terrorists in Gaza.
The Education Ministry said that the schools were operating “illegally and without a license,” and that the parents of the schoolchildren had been notified over the last months to register their children in other city schools.
