Israel's News & Views Blog‘Demographic challenges” are leaving the IDF with fewer soldiers than it needs to defend the country against its threats, forcing the state to take a strong stance against draft-dodging.
Brig.-Gen. Orna Barbivai, deputy head of the IDF’s Human Resources Branch, complained:
“We don’t have enough soldiers…we cannot lend our hand to draft-dodging in any way whatsoever…we must [...]
The IDF says a planned raid on a West Bank village was called off after an Israeli soldier disclosed the classified details online.
The Israeli military says that the combat soldier posted the time and location of the raid on his Facebook page, saying that troops were planning on “cleaning up” the village.
Fellow soldiers reported the [...]
IDF soldiers opened fire Friday morning on Palestinian terrorists who were caught planting explosive devices along the security fence that separates Israel from Gaza, near Kibbutz Kissufim in the western Negev region.
The terrorists fled the scene.
The four terror cell members came to the fence carrying grenades and assault rifles. They were able to plant [...]
You might have heard this story. When Barack Obama became the president of the United States of America, he was told that he could no longer use his personal BlackBerry to receive e-mails, for the reason that it is not secure. Shortly after he took office, however, press reports emerged that one of America’s government [...]
Former Senior officials of the IDF stress that despite the gravity of incidents of abuse against Palestinians, they are few and far between. This claim came as a defense after a report of female soldiers’ testimonies of abuse of Palestinians. Former IDF chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak said, “Cases in which IDF soldiers abuse civilian [...]
When the Iranian scientist Professsor Massoud Ali Muhammadi was killed by a remote control bomb on a motorcycle in Teheran last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Israel, saying that it was carried out in the signature “Zionist style” – Interior Minister Mostafa Muhammed Najjar vowed revenge.
So last week’s failed attempt on the lives of Israeli [...]
Well, it’s not over yet, relations between Israel and Turkey are still prickly. Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon refused to shake the hand of Turkish envoy, Ambassador Ahmed Oguz Celikkol and made him sit on a sofa, lower than his seat, during a meeting in Jerusalem this week. Also, there was no Turkish flag [...]
2009 saw approximately 2,000 haredi yeshiva students join the IDF or National Service. This is in sharp contrast to the 300 to 400 in 2008.
Most of these ultra-Orthodox men who chose to enlist in the IDF or do national service were older than 25. Most married with children.
The sharp rise may have been a [...]
At an Israeli Air Force School Graduation Ceremony on Thursday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak called on Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority to reenter in negotiations on the Middle East peace process. It is expected that Abbas will meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Sunday, when the two leaders are expected to discuss [...]
On Wednesday, the Knesset rejected a bill which would have reduced the number of girls who dodge military service, by falsely declaring that they are religious. The bill brought by Kadima’s Yisrael Hasson, was quashed 63 to 29.
The meat of the proposed law, would have girls, asking to be exempt from the military on religious [...]
In an action this week Hezbollah proved that indeed they are not only anti-Zionist but altogether anti-Jewish – of course given this powerful terror organization’s track record of Holocaust denial, this should not come as such a shock.
The Hezbollah-owned television station, Al-Manar, condemned the distribution of a textbook in an English language school in Lebanon, [...]
This is something you don’t see everyday.
This is the testimony of Col. Richard Kemp. He disagrees with Goldstone Report that claims that IDF committed war crimes in Operation Cast Lead.
His resume includes (his words): former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, service in NATO and the United Nations, commander in Northern Ireland, Bosnia [...]
It’s now gone farther than Turkey banning Israel from a joint military exercise with the US and other EU countries, or Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan ripping Shimon Peres in public at Davos, or accusing Israel of aiming phosphorus bombs at civilian targets, or even staging war games with Syria, which Turkey did a few days [...]
How’s this for an oops story. A soldier on guard duty just roamed into IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi’s office, stole his credit card numbers, and gave them to an Israeli Arab he happened to own money to. While he was at it, he stole a souvenir pistol given to Ashkenazi as a gift [...]
She only wanted to say the mourner’s kaddish for her grandmother, who had just passed away. But when the young woman tried to do so in a synagogue at her base, she was barred from doing so, and was so affected by the rejection, that she left the base to say kaddish in a synagogue [...]
