Jewish & World News

The PA's Ma'an news service said Sunday that an Israeli citizen had been arrested over the weekend. The man, according to the report, attempted to infiltrate Sinai through the Taba crossing. He was able to make it across from the Israeli side, but was arrested when he tried to enter Egypt. He did not have a visa or any identification papers.

A relatively small swarm of locusts has arrived in Israel, according to Agriculture Ministry officials. By sunrise Tuesday, they'll be dead, officials vowed. The swarm crossed the border from Egypt, where millionsof the insects have attacked fields and farms in the Giza region.

The Agriculture Ministry issued a special warning to farmers in Israel following the swarms of locusts plaguing neighboring Egypt . The ministry said Monday that it has been preparing for the possibility that the insect will invade Israel if Cairo fails to deal with the problem properly. The entire region was placed on a "locust alert" by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in January.

As a reminder to those who thought the account related in the Passover Haggadah might have been an exaggeration – think again. Millions of locusts have swooped down in a swarm from the sky on to the land of Egypt. The locust plague struck over the weekend in the Giza region, home to a cluster of famous pyramids, according to reports in Arab media.

Egypt's President Mohamed Morsi said on Wednesday vitriolic remarks he made against Jews and Zionists in 2010 had been taken out of context and said he was not against the Jewish faith. "As I have said before the quotes were taken out of context... I am not against the Jewish faith, I am not against Jews who practice their religion," Morsi told a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.

The Holocaust was a U.S. intelligence hoax and the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis actually moved to the United States, an Egyptian state news official said. "The myth of the Holocaust is an industry that America invented," said Fathi Shihab-Eddim, a senior figure close to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi responsible for appointing the editors of all state-run newspapers.

In a talk last week with a visiting group of US senators, Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi reportedly suggested that the Jewish-controlled media in the United States had distorted his 2010 comments about Jews being “the descendants of apes and pigs” and “Zionist bloodsuckers”. The American magazine ‘Foreign Policy’ reported on Wednesday that the Egyptian leader had come under fire from the seven senators for his offensive remarks, which became known earlier this month. Morsi apparently denied harboring negative feelings about Jews but added, according to US Senator Chris Coons: “‘Well, I think we all know that the media in the United States has made a big deal of this and we know the media of the United States is controlled by certain forces and they don’t view me favorably.”

Egyptian security officials have reached a temporary cease-fire agreement with heads of the radical Salafi organizations in the Sinai Peninsula, according to an Egyptian media report released on Monday. The newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm reported that a delegation sent by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi met with Salafi leaders in two mosques in the city of Sheikh Zayed on Saturday and reached an agreement to free prisoners, as well as discontinue fighting for a week.

Egypt's newly-appointed Defense Minister General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stressed Cairo's commitment to the 1979 peace treaty in a telephone call with his Israeli counterpart, Ehud Barak, the London-based al-Hayat newspaper reported Friday. Al-Sisi spoke to Barak before meeting with President Mohammed Morsi. The talk was held amid Israeli concerns over Egypt's decision to deploy fighter jets and tanks in the Sinai Peninsula – a move which violates the Camp David agreement. 

The IDF stationed an Iron Dome rocket-defense battery west of Eilat on Sunday. The move comes days after two Grad type rockets were fired at the Red Sea resort city, apparently from the Sinai Peninsula. The IDF spokesman confirmed the deployment of the battery, saying that the move was part of a national plan to test the system in various locations around the country.

Hamas announced Thursday that it was doing its utmost to help the Egyptian authorities capture the terrorists who killed 16 Egyptian border guards in Sinai on August 5. The announcement came as Palestinians in the Gaza Strip reported that Hamas security forces have rounded up a number of suspects belonging to extremist Islamic groups in the context of efforts to solve the case.

Hamas is prepared to close all the underground tunnels along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt if the Egyptians agree to reopen the Rafah border crossing on a permanent basis, Hamas officials announced Sunday. “The tunnels are a necessary and popular method of breaking the criminal blockade on the Gaza Strip,” Salah Bardaweel, a Hamas legislator and spokesman, told reporters.

Global jihad terrorists in Sinai receive financial and logistical support from other Salafi terror cells in Afghanistan and Iraq, a senior Israeli official revealed on Wednesday. The groups are usually not connected to Iran, which is working to establish its own terrorist infrastructure in Sinai via Hezbollah, according to the official. A large proportion of the weaponry used in the recent spate of attacks against Israel originated in Libya, where arms depots were raided and cleared out following the revolution there last year.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy on Sunday night vowed revenge against the perpetrators of a raid on an Egyptian military base that killed 15 soldiers and wounded seven. The attackers also tried to strike Israeli targets in a cross-border raid, prompting Israeli officials to call for Egypt to restore order to the increasingly lawless Sinai Peninsula. "This cowardly attack will not go without a response," Morsy said according to AFP. "Those who committed this crime will pay it dearly." The Egyptian president called an urgent meeting of Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces following the attack.

Global jihad terrorists infiltrated into Israel on Sunday night after breaking into an Egyptian military base and stealing two armored jeeps. One of the vehicles exploded as it rammed through the Kerem Shalom Crossing into Israel and another crossed through, after which it was targeted by an Israel Air Force strike. Simultaneously, dozens of mortar shells rained down on nearby communities. Al Arabiya reported that 15 Egyptian soldiers were killed in the attack on their base and several more were wounded.

Egypt has denied reports saying President Mohamed Morsi sent his Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres a letter in which he expressed his hope for regional peace. "There is no truth to these (reports). President Morsi did not send any letter to the Israeli president," Presidential spokesman Yasser Ali said Tuesday evening. "Everything that was published by the Israeli media is unfounded fabrications."

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has sent a letter to President Shimon Peres, thanking him for his Ramadan greeting and expressing hope that the people of the region would return to coexist peacefully. Egypt's Islamist leader said he is "looking forward to exerting our best efforts to get the Middle East process back on its track in order to achieve security and stability." The surprising missive from Cairo may be interpreted as an attempt by the new regime to clarify that it supports peace, despite the harsh criticism against Israel and the close relations with Hamas in Gaza.

A growing number of countries are flocking to Israel to study border security as the Defense Ministry works to complete the construction of a physical and technological barrier along the Egyptian border. In August, a delegation from India will arrive to study the various technologies used by the IDF to secure the borders with the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Egypt, and which could be implemented as part of India’s own fence with Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Terrorists who attacked workers at the Sinai border fence, murdering one, had hoped to infiltrate Israel and slaughter Jewish families. The terror group had already picked its target: the town of Nitzana, near the Israel-Egypt border. The Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group behind the June 18 attack revealed its full plan in a video published online.

The first political scandal of Egypt’s fledgling electoral democracy erupted Monday after an Islamist lawmaker was expelled from his ultraconservative party, accused of fabricating a story that he was viciously beaten by masked gunmen. Doctors said that the bandages on his face in fact covered up plastic surgery on his nose. The lawmaker, Anwar el-Balkimy, had belonged to Al Nour, part of the ultraconservative Salafi movement — Egypt’s religious right — whose members typically condemn plastic surgery as sinful, along with most music and other popular entertainment.