Two days after a terror attack left a three-month-old baby deadin Jerusalem, tensions are high in the holy city, and the papers and police fear the worst is yet to come.
The front page of Yedioth Ahronoth warns its readers: “High alert in Jerusalem.” The paper reports that police are preparing for violence after Friday prayers at the Dome of the Rock and have beefed up security. Thousands of extra Border Police will be deployed around the Temple Mount Friday morning to prevent any violence. Authorities already announced that access to prayers on the Mount will be restricted to men over the age of 40, although women of any age can enter.
While Yedioth reports on what is being done to prevent violence,Israel Hayom tells its readers who is to blame for it all: Mahmoud Abbas. “Netanyahu: The attack in Jerusalem is supported by Abu Mazen [Abbas],” reads the front-page headline. On the inside pages, the paper elaborates on the prime minister’s statement. Netanyahu added that the Palestinian Authority “glorifies the murderers and embraces the organization to which the terrorists belong: Hamas.”
Security forces were spreading out throughout East Jerusalem as well as the Old City Friday morning ahead of what was expected to be a volatile day, following a week of Arab rioting and violence in the capital.
Police said they would limit entry to the Temple Mount compound to males 40 and up and women of any age, after receiving information that Arab youths intended to foment unrest in the area after the conclusion of Friday prayers. Police officials warned they would show “zero tolerance” for unruly behavior.
The forces included police, Border Police and several special units. Medical teams would also be on high alert throughout the city, officials said.
Tensions flared in the capital Thursday in the wake of a Wednesday terrorist attack on a Jerusalem Light Rail station in which three-month-old Chaya Zissel Braun was killed and eight others were injured.
Jerusalem’s mayor called for a crackdown against the wave of Palestinian unrest. In an interview, Mayor Nir Barkat said the violence had become intolerable, and he vowed to restore order.
“Yesterday what we saw is another elevated level, of people running over a 3-month-old baby,” he told The Associated Press. “We must fight violence and we will win that war.”
Police on Thursday dispersed a crowd of rioters who were throwing stones at the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi al-Joz. No injuries were reported but the stones caused damage to a vehicle, according to the Ynet news site.
Early Thursday morning, a Jewish kindergarten in the Ma’ale Hazeitim neighborhood on the Mount of Olives, near Ras al-Amoud in East Jerusalem, was pelted with rocks. No casualties were reported in the incident.
Police were searching for the perpetrators, who fled the scene.
US citizens were also warned against entering East Jerusalem neighborhoods that have been the scene of demonstrations and violent clashes since Wednesday night. “The current dynamic security environment underscores the importance of situational awareness, especially in crowded public places that may have minimal overt police presence,” the statement said.
Wednesday’s train station attack was carried out by Silwan resident Abdel Rahman al-Shaludi. He attempted to flee the scene of the attack on foot and was shot by police, a police spokesperson said. Al-Shaludi later died of his wounds in hospital.
Hours after the attack, Arab residents of the capital hurled rocks at a train station in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat, causing damage to two train carriages at the site.
Police and Border Police forces were showered with stones overnight Wednesday and throughout Thursday morning in the East Jerusalem village of Issawiya, near the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus. No casualties were reported in the attacks.
The destruction of the widespread Hamas tunnel network was considered a major Israeli achievement of the recent war in Gaza, but the Hamas weekly newspaper Al-Risalah reports that Hamas continues digging tunnels from Gaza into Israel.
A reporter for Al-Risalah claims to have visited an “offensive tunnel” – a term referring to an underground conduit planned to be used in an attack against Israel. Hamas has attacked Israel via tunnels of this nature in the past, either by sending armed terrorists into Israel to target Israelis, or – as in the famous case of Gilad Shalit - by capturing a soldier nearby and abducting him into Gaza.
The tunnel purportedly visited by the reporter was destroyed by Israel during the recent war, but is now apparently being restored by Hamas, dozens of meters underground.
The Al-Risalah report confirms other evidence that Israel's successful detection and destruction of terrorist tunnels during Operation Protective Edge is on the brink of coming undone. Last month, for instance, Hamas confirmed that one of its members was killed while helping to dig a tunnel.
The recent revelation comes after a senior IDF commander of the Gaza Division engineering unit last week assessed that not all Hamas terror tunnels were destroyed, confirming earlier Hamas statements which bragged that not all of the group's tunnels were destroyed.
Regardless of that, and the fact that humanitarian materials were siphoned by Hamas to build the tunnels in the first place, Israel began transporting more construction materials into Gaza last Tuesday as a "humanitarian gesture," including 600 tons of cement, 50 truckloads of aggregate and 10 truckloads of steel.
The world has likewise turned a blind-eye to the overwhelming evidence of renewed tunnel construction, with world states last Sunday pledging $5.4 billion
The world has likewise turned a blind-eye to the overwhelming evidence of renewed tunnel construction, with world states last Sunday pledging $5.4 billion
A massive sunspot, almost the size of Jupiter, is releasing large numbers of flares and NOAA warns that there is no sign of it slowing down.
So far, due to its position on the sun disc, there have been no major effects here on Earth but NOAA warns that that could change over the coming days.
Some HF radio blackouts have occurred, but they have been short-lived.
The active region is now moving into line with Earth and for the next few days blasts produced will put us in the firing line. NOAA estimates the chance of M-class flares at 95% and X-class flares at 55% over the next 24 hours.
For up to date news on the behemoth sunspot click here.
Did you know that a storm 14 times larger than the Earth is happening on the sun right now? Earlier this week, it unleashed a flare which was a million times more powerful than all of the nuclear weapons in existence combined. Fortunately, that flare was not directed at us. But now the area of the sun where this solar storm is located is rotating toward Earth. An eruption on the sun at just the right time and at just the right angle could result in a society-crippling electromagnetic pulse blasting this planet. So if your computers, cell phones and electronic equipment get fried at some point over the next few weeks, you will know what is probably to blame. Such an electromagnetic pulse has hit our planet before, and as you will read about below, some very prominent voices are warning that it will happen again. It is just a matter of time.
Scientists tell us that the absolutely massive sunspot group that has recently formed on the sun is highly unusual. NASA has described it as “crackling” with magnetic energy. The mainstream media has not been paying too much attention to it, but this sunspot group is potentially extremely dangerous.
The following is an excerpt from an article on Discovery.com that gives some of the technical details about what has been going on…
The sunspot, a dark patch in the sun’s photosphere, represents intense solar magnetism bursting from the sun’s interior known as an active region. This particular active region, designated AR2192, has been rumbling with intense flare activity, recently exploding with 2 X-class flares, causing some short-lived high-frequency (HF) radio black outs around the globe.
Such blackouts are triggered by the intense extreme ultraviolet and X-ray radiation that solar flares can generate, causing ionization effects in the Earth’s upper atmosphere — a region known as the ionosphere. HF radio can be strongly hindered by this activity, triggering blackouts that can effect air traffic and amateur radio operators.
The other day a flare erupted which did cause radio blackouts all over the world for a time. But we were fortunate that the flare was not directed at us. If it had been, the results could have potentially been catastrophic.
We have not seen anything like this sunspot group for a very long time, and according to a report posted by the Daily Mail, experts are saying that we might not see another one like this for 25 years…
Unfortunately, there are no signs that this sunspot group is fading.
In fact, an official at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said that “it continues to grow in size and complexity“.
Below, I have posted a video which shows some of the recent activity on the sun. As you can see, these explosions can be quite violent…
For those not familiar with “the Carrington Event”, it was a massive solar storm in 1859 that fried telegraph machines all over Europe and North America. You can read about it on Wikipedia right here.
According to Peter Vincent Pry, who advises Congress on homeland security issues, a large enough geomagnetic solar storm could produce effects similar to an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated by a nuclear weapon that “could collapse power grids everywhere on the planet and destroy EHV (extra high voltage) transformers and other electronic systems that would require years to repair or replace.” While the danger posed by a G5 solar storm gets mentioned occasionally at Congressional hearings, there really hasn’t been any major action.
Earlier this year, a Homeland Security adviser said America is not ready for an EMP attack, never mind a G5 solar storm, and it’s claimed that the U.S. power grid fails more often than any other in the world. If a large enough solar storm does impact the United States, the damaged electronic systems can cause a cascade of failures throughout the broader infrastructure, including banking systems, energy systems, transportation systems, food production and delivery systems, water systems, emergency services, and even the internet, so people may not even realize at first what has happened. Effectively, the U.S. would be thrown back to the pre-industrial age following a solar superstorm, and yet we are not prepared for the worst.
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