Israel will not tolerate any missiles or mortars being fired from either Syria or from Gaza and will respond with disproportionate force, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Thursday, a day after projectiles were fired at Israel from across both frontiers.
Speaking in the southern Israeli city of Netivot on Thursday evening, Netanyahu said that the country will not continue to absorb rocket fire “not from the north or from the south.”
“Anyone who thinks [of firing] a drizzle will receive a downpour,” he said during a ceremony in the Gaza border city. “The response of the past weeks speaks for itself.”
On Wednesday, a mortar shell fired from Syria struck the northern Golan Heights.
The projectile, the latest of a series of apparently errant rounds to hit Israel in recent days, exploded in an open field near Israel’s border with Syria, causing no casualties or damage, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement.
It was the sixth such incident this week and came as fighting between President Bashar Assad’s regime and the numerous rebel groups in southern Syria escalated in recent weeks.
In response to the incidents, Israeli jets have targeted Syrian regime artillery batteries near the border several times, though there were no reports of any Israeli response in Syria Wednesday.
The United Nations, Russia and others have called for Israel to show restraint and keep tensions from spiraling out of control.
Later Wednesday night, a mortar shell fired from Gaza landed in an open field in the Eshkol region, causing no injury or damage.
In response, Israeli jets struck three targets overnight, which belonged to the Hamas terror group, which rules the Strip. The strikes were all carried out in northern Gaza, according to an IDF statement.
Israel is currently readying itself in case of all-out war.
Beginning next week, the Home Front Command will kick off “Standing Firm,” a preparedness drill which will include exercises to test the ability of the IDF and local governments to handle rocket attacks, terrorists infiltrating communities, electric grid failures and other emergency situations.
On Tuesday morning, the Home Front Command will sound the rocket alert siren in cities around Israel at different times and then throughout the country at 7:05 p.m., except for the communities surrounding the Gaza Strip.
According to the army, some 230,000 rockets of various sizes and warhead capacities are currently aimed toward Israel from a host of enemies.
The latest ballistic missile tests carried out by Pyongyang show that the precision of North Korea’s missiles is improving, South Korean government sources told the Yonhap news agency on Friday.
Meanwhile North Korea's Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho warned that Pyongyang is ready to take further action in response to what it considers as provocations from the West.
"North Korea is ready to launch another attack in defiance of the provocations by the United States," Ri Yong-ho stressed on Thursday, as quoted by Yonhap.
Pyongyang confirmed on September 9 that it had carried out a nuclear test, at its northeastern nuclear test site. The nuclear experiment is believed to be the fifth and largest since Pyongyang started pursuing nuclear and ballistic missile programs, drawing condemnation from the international community.
Two weeks ago we reported that chancellor Angela Merkel was facing humiliation, political defeat in in an election in her home state. Sure enough, she lost by a wide margin, with the anti-immigrant AfD party soaring in the first shock result of the current political cycle. That, however, was only the beginning because as Reuters writes today, still reeling from the state election rout, Angela Merkel's conservatives "are bracing for further losses in the Berlin city vote on Sunday."
Following the CDU's disastrous performance in the election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Merkel's home state, which pushed Merkel's party into an unprecedented third place by the AfD, her conservative CSU allies in Bavaria have blamed Merkel personally and demanded a migrant cap, which she rejects. Polls show the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) may be able to drop Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) as coalition partners in the capital's assembly.
Meanwhile, with the ruling coalition in shambles as a result of Merkel's widely unpopular immigration policies, the AfD, which has won seats in nine of Germany's 16 states, has soared by successfully playing on immigration concerns, validated most recently on Wednesday night by the violence between locals and refugees in the German town of Bautzen.
Earlier this month, YouTube, the behemoth video-sharing website was accused of censoring users.
Claiming some of their videos had been barred from making money through the company’s ad services, YouTube hosts like Philip DeFranco spoke out against the policy, claiming over “a dozen of his videos had been flagged as inappropriate for advertising, including one dinged for ‘graphic content or excessive strong language.’“
In a video entitled “YouTube Is Shutting Down My Channel and I’m Not Sure What To Do,” DeFranco called YouTube’s policy “censorship with a different name,” since users touching on what the company considers to be controversial subjects end up losing money. “If you do this on the regular, and you have no advertising,” DeFranco added, “it’s not sustainable.”
While YouTube has already confirmed its policy regarding what it considers unfit for monetization hasn’t changed, the issue might lie elsewhere now that the company seems more efficient in enforcing its own rules. As a matter of fact, the content policy changed in 2012, when YouTube first introduced its “ad-friendly” guidelines.
So it’s not a surprise to see many claiming their content is being censored by Google’s YouTube. After all, with the amount of power the company holds in Washington, it’s as if Google - or Alphabet - is an actual wing of the government.
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