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Friday April 22, 2005

Shorts: Mideast

Arab Bank allegedly funneled money for terrorism

jerusalem (jta) | The Arab Bank worked as a front for al-Qaida, Hamas and other terrorist groups, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The bank’s New York branch was involved in the transfer of more than $20 million to and from terrorists or terrorist groups, including Al-Qaida, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the newspaper reported. The Jordan-based bank recently agreed to suspend its American operations under pressure from American and European regulatory officials.

Several American and Israeli victims of terrorist attacks have filed lawsuits against the Arab Bank, accusing it of transferring funds to its branches in Palestinian areas for payouts to suicide bombers’ families.

Abbas: Fugitives have turned in weapons

jerusalem (ap) | Palestinian officials have collected weapons from fugitives in two towns turned over to their control, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said this week.

Abbas said the operation took place in Jericho and Tulkarem, but militants said they have not handed in all their arms.

At a Feb. 8 summit, Israel pledged to turn over five West Bank towns but halted the process after the first two, charging that the Palestinians had not carried out their promises — including collecting the weapons.

Abbas disputed that. “All the fugitives in the cities that were evacuated, and that is Jericho and Tulkarem, their weapons were taken from them, and they are all now working in civil and security branches of the government,” he said, in a recording broadcast on Israel Radio.

Israel to build homes for Gaza evacuees

jerusalem (ap) | Israel said last week it will build dozens of temporary homes for settlers uprooted by this summer’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said he will cooperate in coordinating the pullout.

Palestinian coordination is considered by the United States and Israel a key step in helping avert chaos in Gaza after the evacuation, which is shaping up as one of the most formidable challenges in Israeli history.

Israeli media this week reported that Sharon is considering delaying the pullout until mid-August, after the completion of a three-week Jewish mourning period that marks the destruction of the two biblical temples. The pullout was initially set to begin at the end of July.

Israel issues bids for settlement homes

jerusalem (ap) | Israel is planning to build 50 new homes in a West Bank settlement, a government official said this week, despite repeated U.S. demands for a freeze on settlement construction.

Sharon has repeatedly said he wants to strengthen large West Bank settlements, even as he prepares to pull out of Gaza.

Yaakov Harel, spokesman for the Israel Lands Authority, said this week the agency was seeking bids for construction of the new homes in Elkana, a settlement near the Israel-West Bank boundary. Construction could begin within three months.

Liberal rabbis endorse gay festival

jerusalem (jps) | Religious leaders joined forces with Jerusalem’s Gay and Lesbian center this week in support of a major international gay parade scheduled to take place in Jerusalem this summer, calling the controversial event “a basic democratic right.”

The rare show of unity among Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionalist rabbis in favor of the parade came on the heels of a similarly unusual alliance of senior religious leaders of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam who have come out vociferously against the 10-day event, which they view as a deliberate affront and provocation to millions of believers around the world.

Police arrest three in rabbi murder plot

jerusalem (ap) | Israeli security forces have foiled a plan to assassinate a prominent rabbi by members of the same radical Palestinian group that killed an Israeli Cabinet minister in 2001, a police investigator said.

Acting on a tip from the Shin Bet security agency, detectives arrested three Palestinians from Jerusalem who were about to launch an attack on Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Jewish Shas Party and a vociferous opponent of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Gaza pullout plan.

Rabin’s assassin goes on hunger strike

jerusalem (jta) | Yigal Amir informed the warden of Ayalon Prison, where he is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, that he will starve himself unless he is allowed private visits with his wife Larissa Trimbobbler, authorities said this week.

Amir married Trimbobbler in a secret proxy wedding last year but the Prisons Service has refused his request to consummate the union, citing concern that he could use her to pass messages to his supporters on the outside.

Civil liberties groups have backed Amir’s demand, noting that even jailed Arab terrorists in Israel enjoy conjugal rights.

Tel Aviv gets new chief rabbi

jerusalem (jta) | Tel Aviv got a new chief rabbi after two years without one.

Yisrael Meir Lau, a former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, was elected to the Tel Aviv post this week by a vote of 19-10.

His rival in the race was Beersheva’s chief rabbi, Yehuda Deri, brother of Aryeh Deri, the influential former leader of the Sephardic Orthodox Shas Party.

Lau, a Holocaust survivor and Israel Prize winner, can keep his new office for life but is widely expected to resign in 2008 so he can run for the Israel’s presidency.

Bar mitzvah behind bars

jerusalem (jta) | An Israeli underworld figure awaiting extradition to the United States will host his son’s bar mitzvah in prison.

Last week, the Tel Aviv District Court denied a furlough request by Zev Rosenstein to celebrate his son’s coming of age at home, saying he could hold the ceremony instead in Sharon Prison, where the suspected drug lord is incarcerated. No date was set for the festivities.

Israel-U.S. fighter jet deal in jeopardy?

jerusalem (jta) | Israel denied that the United States had suspended Israel’s participation in developing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Reuters and the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv reported last week that the Pentagon decision was made to protest Israel’s defense dealings with China.

Israel was to have the privilege of first purchase of the warplanes, but that was suspended because Israel violated a U.S. export ban by upgrading China’s fleet of Israeli Harpy attack drones, the reports said.

Israeli cleared in Sharon scandal

jerusalem (ap) | Israel’s state prosecutor decided last week to clear a prominent Israeli businessman of accusations he bribed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other senior officials.

Businessman David Appel was initially indicted on charges he bribed Sharon, Vice Premier Ehud Olmert and lawmaker Nehama Ronen.

The original indictment accused Appel, who was trying to promote a large tourism project in Greece, of giving Sharon a $690,000 bribe in the late 1990s, when Sharon was foreign minister.

Whistle-blower’s travel ban extended

jerusalem (jps) | Israel extended by one year the order forbidding whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu from leaving the country by another year, Interior Minister Ophir Paz-Pines said this week.

After being imprisoned for 18 years for divulging intelligence about Israel’s nuclear capacity to the British press, Vanunu was released last year but under severe restrictions: He is not allowed to leave Israel and his movements within the country are limited.

Vandals target Rabin memorial again

jerusalem (jta) | A Tel Aviv monument to Yitzhak Rabin was vandalized for the second time this month. “Nazi” was scrawled across the memorial plaque at Rabin Square, site of the prime minister’s 1995 assassination. Red paint also was daubed over Rabin’s name.

Earlier this month, unknown vandals spray-painted the word “death” on the Israeli flag that flies at the square in Rabin’s honor. Police said this week’s attack appeared linked to other graffiti found nearby on municipal-owned vehicles.

In Jerusalem, police are still searching for two men believed to have defaced the graves of Rabin and his wife, Leah, in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl.

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