Click here for prior news from November 27th 2024
Click here to look at earlier maps (and events) over 4000 years of history for "Israel - Deep inside the plucky country".
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The US had opened a consulate in Old Jerusalem back in 1844. But like diplomatic missions of nearly every other country, from 1966 (unofficially from May 1948 when the consul-general in Jerusalem was shot dead) until 2018 the actual US Embassy had been in Tel Aviv, a result of the ambiguous legal status surrounding Jerusalem for more than a century. Under the UN Partition Plan of November 1947, Jerusalem was to have been placed under international governance, which thus precluded it from being considered under the sovereignty of any State. But while this UN plan had been accepted by the Jews and the majority of UN countries, it had been rejected by the Arabs (and all of the surrounding Arab countries) who declared war.
The US Embassy opened at its Jerusalem location on May 14, 2018, the 70th anniversary of the creation of the modern State of Israel. On March 4, 2019, the US Consulate-General was formally integrated into the US Embassy in Jerusalem.
Australia Israel relations
In Australia in October 2018, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Australia was reviewing whether to move Australia's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. On Friday 14 December 2018, Morrison announced Australia's recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, though there were no immediate plans to move its embassy from Tel Aviv.
This recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was reversed by the ALP Federal Government on Tuesday 18 October 2022. Foreign Minister Penny Wong stressed that Australia remained a "steadfast friend" to Israel, however its embassy would remain in Tel Aviv.
Jerusalem's history over the past century
British forces captured the city from the Ottoman Turks during World War I and maintained control under a League of Nations mandate for 30 years. In November 1947, a United Nations plan terminated the British mandate for implementation at midnight May 14 1948, and partitioned Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem to become an international zone. While accepted by the Jews, the proposed plan never was implemented as civil war erupted. The British organized their withdrawal and intervened only on an occasional basis. When a cease-fire ended the fighting in 1949, Israeli forces held Jerusalem's western precincts while Jordan occupied the city's eastern districts, including the old city with its holy sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the al Aqsa Mosque and the Western Wall.
Click here for more details and to see a map of the UN's original proposal. The State of Israel increased their area by almost 60% of the area that had been allocated to the proposed Arab state. This included the Jaffa, Lydda and Ramle area, Galilee, some parts of the Negev, a wide strip along the Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem road, and some territories in the West Bank, placing them under military rule. With Jordan occupying the West Bank and the Egyptian military occupying Gaza, no state was created for the Palestinian Arabs.
Israel and Jordan soon annexed the portions of Jerusalem they held, with Israel in 1950 declaring the city as its capital, but this accordingly went unrecognized by other nations. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured East Jerusalem, along with the West Bank. Israel later annexed East Jerusalem and reunified the city, again an act that has gone unrecognized by the international community while Palestinian claims remain unresolved.
Six Day War June 1967
Click here for the whole article
Abraham Rabinovich
June 05, 2007
FORTY years after the Six Day War, the consequences of Israel's extraordinary victory are yet to be sorted out. Israel was a tiny Middle Eastern backwater in 1967, with a population of 2.6 million surrounded by a hostile Arab world of 80 million. This disparity seemed to defy the natural order of things and it was a virtual consensus in the Arab world that the Jewish state would fall, sooner rather than later. In Israel itself, the enthusiasm and energy that marked the founding of the state out of the ashes of the Holocaust had been dimmed by the petty problems of getting by in a country with a massive defence burden and a lame economy.
It was the Soviet Union, for reasons never adequately clarified, that lit the fuse that would transform the region. In mid-May 1967, it declared that Israel was massing troops in the north in preparation for an attack on Syria. Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol offered to personally tour the north with the Soviet ambassador to show it wasn't true. The ambassador declined.
There had been small-scale skirmishing between Israel and Syria over the headwaters of the Jordan and Israeli leaders had issued warnings, but there was no massing of troops. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leading figure in the Arab world, felt impelled to come to Syria's aid. He moved his divisions through the Sinai desert towards Israel, ordered the removal of UN troops who had been stationed there since 1956, and closed the Straits of Tiran (which separates the Gulf of Aqaba from the Red Sea) to Israeli shipping.
Back in 1956, Nasser had blocked Israeli shipping from passing through the Straits. A short war followed with Israel capturing the whole of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. After the US pressured Israel to withdraw, Israel declared that if Egyptian forces would again blockade the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba, it would consider this a "casus belli" - case of war. Israel mobilised its reserves.
Nothing happened for more than two weeks. But mobilisation had paralysed the Israeli economy and Jerusalem had to either stand down or strike. On the morning of June 5, Israeli planes, flying low to avoid radar, suddenly rose into the Egyptian skies. Within three hours, the Egyptian air force was destroyed. Soon after, the Jordanian, Syrian and part of the Iraqi air forces were gone, too.
On the third day of the war, the West Bank and Jordanian Jerusalem fell. Syria's Golan Heights followed. The Arab world was stunned, Israel euphoric. The war catapulted Israel into a new era. Brimful of self-confidence and renewed energy, it attracted Jewish immigrants from the West and more than a million from the Soviet Union. Since 1967, Israel's population has tripled to 7.1 million (of whom 1.4 million are Israeli Arabs), its gross national product has grown by 630 per cent and per capita income has almost tripled to $21,000.
A major result of the Six Day War was to persuade the Arab world that Israel was too strong to be defeated. Internalising that view, Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, became in 1970 the first Arab leader to declare readiness to make peace with Israel if it withdrew from all territory it had captured in the Six Day War. Israel insisted, however, on territorial changes.
It took the 1973 Yom Kippur War to persuade Israel to withdraw from all Egyptian territory and for Egypt to agree to peace without insisting on Israel's withdrawal on other fronts as well.
The Oslo accords in 1993, marking the beginning of a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians, also enabled Jordan to make peace with Israel without being accused of betraying the Palestinian cause.
In 2000, Syria announced its readiness for peace. Though negotiations with Damascus broke down, virtually the entire Arab world now accepted the legitimacy, or at least the existence, of the Jewish state in its midst.
But increasing radicalisation has brought to the Palestinian leadership a movement dedicated to Israel's destruction. If there is an answer for Israel, it lies, as in 1967, in bold and imaginative leadership — but this time on the political playing field.
West Bank Fence
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Extract: Article by Amos Harel, Haaretz.com
July 14, 2009
Seven years after construction work began on the West Bank separation fence, the project seems to have run aground. Work has slowed significantly since September 2007. With fierce opposition coming from the United States, Israel has halted work on the "fingers" — enclaves east of the Green Line that were to have included large settlement blocs such as Ariel, Kedumim, Karnei Shomron and Ma'aleh Adumim, within the fence. The military has, in practice, closed up the holes that were to have led to these "fingers". But giant gaps remain in the southern part of the fence, particularly in the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, in the Etzion bloc and in the Judean Desert.
Since the cabinet under former prime minister Ariel Sharon first approved construction of the fence, in June 2002, the route has undergone some dramatic changes. The original route, which was inspired by Sharon, was to have effectively annexed about 20 percent of the territory of the West Bank to Israel.
In February 2005, the cabinet amended the route to include just nine percent of the West Bank. In April 2006 an additional one percent was shaved off by the government of Ehud Olmert.
In practice, however, the route encompasses only 4½ percent of West Bank land. The four "fingers" in the last map (and which Israel presented at Annapolis in November 2007) were never built, not at Ariel and Kedumim (where a "fingernail" was built, a short stretch of fence east of the homes of Ariel) — not at Karnei Shomron and Immanuel — not at Beit Arieh, nor south of that, at Ma'aleh Adumim. Instead, with little publicity, fences were put up to close the gaps closer to the Green Line, at Alfei Menashe instead of at Kedumim, at Elkana instead of Ariel and in the Rantis area instead of at Beit Arieh.
About 50,000 people in these settlements remain beyond the fence. West of Ma'aleh Adumim the wall built along Highway 1 blocks the gap in the barrier and leaves the city's 35,000 residents outside of the barrier, forcing them to pass through a Border Police checkpoint in order to reach Jerusalem.
Large gaps remain in the southern West Bank. Between Gilo in south Jerusalem and Gush Etzion are tens of kilometres of barrier, work on which was suspended due to High Court petitions. As a result access to Jerusalem from the direction of Bethlehem (now a part of the Palestinian Territories) is relatively easy — for commuters and terrorists both.
Click here for some news in Sep 2014.
A second, 30-kilometre gap in the fence, stretches from Metzudat Yehuda (Yatir) in the west to the Dead Sea in the east. The state announced during a recent High Court deliberation of a petition submitted by area Bedouin that work on the barrier there was suspended.
Defence Minister Ehud Barak is "determined to complete the security fence, despite the delays", his office said in a statement. "The minister and the military establishment are working to solve the problems delaying its completion".
Defence Ministry officials pointed out that Barak was "among the first supporters of the fence and did much to advance its construction".
Security officials claim the rate of construction depends on finding a solution to the legal issues and point out proudly that there is an unbroken barrier from Tirat Zvi in the Beit She'an Valley (in Northern Israel, just west of the Jordan River) to the southern entrance to Jerusalem, and from southern Gush Etzion (south west of Jerusalem) to Metzudat Yehuda (south east of Hebron).
East of East Jerusalem — E1 and Ma'ale Adumim
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Click here for a recent article in 2023 on E1 and Ma'ale Adumim delayed but not abandoned
Unilateral Thinking (an article in April 2006)
Click here for the full article
Finally, after years in the planning prior to 2006, construction of an Israeli police station is under way in the now infamous E1 area, 12 square kilometers, a patch of empty West Bank land that stretches from the eastern municipal boundary of Jerusalem to the settlement-city of Ma'ale Adumim, which sits across the Jerusalem-Dead Sea highway some five kilometers (three miles) to the east.
Infamous, because every prime minister of Israel for the past decade has wanted to develop E1 in order to fill in the space between Ma'ale Adumim and Jerusalem, with the intention of securing Israel's hold over the settlement and its smaller satellite communities, which together constitute the Ma'ale Adumim settlement bloc. And every US administration up until now has nixed Israeli development here, on the grounds that it would seriously hamper Palestinian territorial contiguity between the north and south of the West Bank, as well as access from the West Bank to Jerusalem, thereby undermining the viability of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, the only realistic formula on the table for Israeli- Palestinian peace.
Ma'ale Adumim, a settlement of 33,000 residents, has for all intents and purposes become a suburb of Jerusalem, even the Palestinians have tacitly accepted the demographic reality. The Geneva Accord, the unofficial 2003 draft of an Israeli- Palestinian final-status agreement, envisaged the settlement remaining under Israeli control. The competition is over who controls the space in between. The Palestinians reject the notion of a permanent Israeli presence in E1, and consecutive US administrations have viewed this as the red line that Israel should not cross.
Building first started in Ma'ale Adumim itself in 1975, during Yitzhak Rabin's first term as prime minister. And it was Rabin, during his second term in office, in August 1994, who formally included E1 within Ma'ale Adumim's city limits, "or order to create territorial contiguity" between the fast-growing settlement and Jerusalem, according to Benny Kashriel, Ma'ale Adumim's mayor for the past 14 years. That Rabin term produced a general master plan for the area (the term E1 is short for East 1, as the parcel of land was marked on old Jerusalem area zoning maps). In 1997, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet commenced procedures to authorize the allocation of the land to built on, and the Housing Ministry started work on detailed plans. Netanyahu's successor, Ehud Barak, supported the project, according to Kashriel, and the bureaucratic process for the approval of the plans got underway.
Gaza Strip
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Israeli Gaza Strip Barrier
Wikipedia
The Israel and Egypt — Gaza Strip barrier is a separation barrier first constructed by Israel in 1994 between the Gaza Strip and Israel. An addition to the barrier was finished in 2005 to separate the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The fence runs along the entire land border of the Gaza Strip. It is made up of wire fencing with posts, sensors and buffer zones on lands bordering Israel, and concrete and steel walls on lands bordering Egypt.
Background: The Gaza Strip borders Egypt on the south-west and Israel on the south, east and north. It is about 41 kilometres long, and between 6 and 12 kilometres wide, with a population of about 2 million people. The shape of the territory was defined by the 1949 Armistice Agreement following the creation of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent war between the Israeli and Arab armies. Under the armistice agreement, Egypt administered the Strip for 19 years, to 1967, when it was occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
In 1993, Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation signed the Oslo Accords establishing the Palestinian Authority with limited administrative control of the Palestinian territories. Pursuant to the Accords, Israel has continued to maintain control of the Gaza Strip's airspace, land borders and territorial waters. Israel started construction of the first 60 kilometres long barrier between the Gaza Strip and Israel in 1994, after the signing of the Oslo Accords. In the 1994 Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it was agreed that "the security fence erected by Israel around the Gaza Strip shall remain in place and that the line demarcated by the fence, as shown on the map, shall be authoritative only for the purpose of the Agreement" (ie. the barrier does not constitute the border). The barrier was completed in 1996.
The barrier was largely torn down by Palestinians at the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000. The barrier was rebuilt between December 2000 and June 2001. A one-kilometre buffer zone was added, in addition to new high technology observation posts. Soldiers were also given new rules of engagement, which, according to Ha'aretz, allow soldiers to fire at anyone seen crawling there at night. Palestinians attempting to cross the barrier into Israel by stealth have been shot and killed.
Hamas, a US-designated terrorist organisation, came to power in Gaza through elections held in 2006. It has since imposed authoritarian rule over the territory, clashing with the more moderate Fatah party — which runs the Palestinian Authority that controls parts of the West Bank — and losing much of its popularity.
October 2023
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country was at war with Hamas after the militant group’s forces poured across the border from Gaza on Saturday October 7, killing over 1,000 residents and capturing over 200 hostages.
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Feliz Solomon and Anat Peled
Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, May 20 2025
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country’s forces would take control of the entire Gaza Strip, after his government agreed to end a months-long blockade by allowing limited aid to enter the enclave. Netanyahu’s remarks on Monday followed the Israeli military’s announcement of what it called a major expansion of ground operations in Gaza and a wave of hundreds of air strikes in recent days targeting what the military said was Hamas’s infrastructure.
Netanyahu said Israel would assert control over the entire territory to pressure Hamas to return the remaining hostages and force the US-designated terrorist group to demilitarise. “We are going to take over all the areas of the Strip,” he said on social media.
The prime minister has come under pressure to address the worsening humanitarian situation for the enclave’s roughly two million people. His office said Sunday that Israel would allow “a basic quantity of food to be brought in” to avoid a starvation crisis. Netanyahu said the decision followed pressure from Israel’s “closest friends in the world,” adding that the country’s backers in the US Senate told him they couldn’t tolerate images of extreme hunger coming out of Gaza and that could affect their continued support.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said after Netanyahu announced the expanded campaign that President Trump and his national security team are engaging in talks with both Israel and Hamas to end the fighting and secure the release of all hostages. “The president has made it very clear he wants to see this conflict in the region end,” she said.
The leaders of the UK, France and Canada in a joint statement criticised Israel’s expansion of its military operations in Gaza and said the government’s restrictions on aid risked breaching international humanitarian law. They also threatened to impose targeted sanctions for settlement expansions in the occupied West Bank. “If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response,” the statement said. The Israeli prime minister’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the statement.
Israel’s decision to allow in aid passed without a vote in the security cabinet, according to an Israeli official. Some far-right politicians have said they oppose any aid entering Gaza as long as there are hostages there. Aid groups have warned for weeks that stockpiles brought in during the ceasefire were running dangerously low and severe shortages of food, fuel, medicine and clean water were imminent. A global hunger watchdog, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification partnership, said last week that nearly half a million people in Gaza already face starvation.
Since the collapse of a ceasefire in March, Israel has ratcheted up pressure on Hamas with attacks on its military and political leadership as well infrastructure. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said Sunday that a recent air strike in the south of the enclave had likely killed the group’s leader Mohammed Sinwar. Sinwar had replaced his brother, who Israeli forces killed last year, at the top of the militant group in Gaza.
Israel’s military began activating troops on Sunday for its expanded ground operations. Military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani told reporters Monday that tens of thousands of reservists were mobilised for the effort. Effie Defrin, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said the military would bisect the Gaza Strip and move civilians to make way for the current operations. On Monday afternoon, Israel’s military ordered Khan Younis, one of Gaza’s largest cities, and nearby areas to be evacuated in advance of an offensive. Much of Gaza’s population has already been displaced many times throughout the 19-month war.
Mostafa Aqad, a 26-year-old resident of Khan Younis, said the sound of gunfire and explosions in his neighbourhood Monday morning caused people to scramble for cover. “It was different this time,” he said. “There were clashes and gunfire coming from every direction.” Palestinian health authorities said hundreds of people have been killed in strikes since Friday, and that more than 53,000 have been killed since the start of the war, though their figures don’t say how many were combatants. The conflict was triggered by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which around 1,200 people were killed and about 250 others were taken hostage inside Gaza.
Israel banned the entry of all aid and other goods into the Gaza Strip in early March. The Israeli government has said Hamas steals aid and uses it to support its war effort, which the group denies.
The US said earlier this month that it was working on a plan, supported by Israel, to resume aid from a number of distribution sites throughout Gaza. Under the plan, the Israeli military would secure the perimeter of the sites while private security firms would ensure the safety of aid workers as they enter them and distribute aid.
Eden Bar Tal, director general of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told reporters on Monday that those distribution sites should be operating in a matter of days. Meanwhile, trucks loaded with aid will begin entering the Strip immediately with items including baby food, flour and some medical supplies, Bar Tal said.
The plan to establish distribution sites has met criticism from the United Nations and other aid groups, which say it violates their principles and could put civilians at risk. A spokeswoman for the U.N.’s humanitarian office in Gaza said it had been approached by Israeli authorities about resuming aid in the interim but details were still being worked out.
Hamas released a statement last week claiming they had released their last living American hostage taken in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, Edan Alexander, as a goodwill gesture to Trump. A Hamas official said the understanding was that his release would result in the entry of humanitarian aid in Gaza and negotiations for a permanent ceasefire. As part of the understanding between the US and Hamas for Alexander’s release, American officials promised to push the Israelis harder to let food and medicine enter the Strip, although no specific quantities were agreed upon, according to people familiar with the negotiations. When the aid didn’t enter after the release, the US and Qatar pressed the Israelis to restart it, people said. US officials said Alexander was released by Hamas without any conditions.
Click here for Assad downfall Syria
Click here for recent news in Iran
Earlier News in Israel
- Yasser Arafat, Fatah, PLO, and Lebanese War 1959 - 2004
- Six Day War, June 5-10 1967
- Closure Lebanese war, August 14 2006
- PLO Interior Minister resigns in Gaza City, May 14 2007
- Annapolis Maryland Peace Conference, November 29 2007
- Iraq Iran truce in Tehran, June 14 2008
- Markets Spin in New York, October 1 2008
- Israel hammers Gaza, December 28 2008
- Fault lines in Netanyahu's fractious alliance, April 6 2009
- Washington jitters, July 29 2009
- Israel agrees to settlement moratorium, November 27 2009
- Israel 'wrecks' peace talks, March 12 2010
- Gaza naval raid, June 1 2010
- Peace or War on settlements, September 20 2010
- Arab "spring", January 29 2011
- Golan Heights confrontations, June 7 2011
- West Bank recognition at UN, September 17 2011
- Iran fires missile near Hormuz in Persian Gulf, January 2 2012
- Iran's nuclear facilities, February 28 2012
- Damascus bomb attack, July 19 2012
- Israel prepares for War with Iran, September 18 2012
- Hamas leader assassination, November 15 2012
- Netanyahu election victory, January 23 2013
- Syria's civil war, June 1 2013
- Western action in Syria, August 28 2013
- Bethlehem separation barrier, December 26 2013
- Gaza offensive, June 21 2014
- State land announced at Gush Etzion Bethlehem, September 2 2014
- Ehud Olmert jail sentence, May 26 2015
- Netanyahu announces Golan Heights is Israel's, April 19 2016
- Jordan thanks Trump (for tempering Temple Mount crisis), July 28 2017
- Israel strikes Syria, April 10 2018
- Israel election, April 7 2019
- Trump's Peace Plan, January 28 2020
- Israel election, March 23 2021
- East Jerusalem clashes, May 11 2021
- West Bank aid offer, February 9 2022
- Israel election, November 1 2022
- Protests in Israel and Backdown by Netanyahu, June 30 2023
- includes Attack by Gaza October 7 2023
- War in Gaza, January 10 2024
- War in Gaza, June 15 2024
- War in Gaza, November 27 2024
- includes Truce in Lebanon
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