19 Nissan 5780
13 April 2020
The News on the Israeli Street
The daily Corona update . . .
*As of 10 pm Monday, there are 11,586 confirmed cases of Corona in Israel. 132 people are in critical condition on respirators. 116 Israelis have died. 1,855 have recovered.
If you have been following the above numbers in recent weeks, dear reader, you will notice that the number of confirmed cases has plateaued. It is true that the number increases, but now it approximates the number who are newly classified as “recovered” each day.
What continues to be extraordinarily worrisome is the number of people in critical condition on respirators. Also, the number of deaths is increasing by about 10 every 24 hours.
As we have written in previous days, a disproportionate number of these deaths are emanating from nursing homes in Israel.
Equally tragic are the deaths in Jewish nursing homes around Europe. At the Beit Shalom nursing home in Amsterdam, 22 residents (25% of the nursing home population) have died from Corona. Other Jewish communities particularly hard hit are in the Jewish communities in the UK and France (where burial areas in the Jewish sections of cemeteries have run out of space).
This morning, a private cargo plane loaded with the bodies of Corona victims landed in Israel to be taken immediately for burial.
Palestinian terror in the last 24 hours . . .
As the number of Jewish community members traveling the roads in Judea and Samaria has steeply decreased in the last month, so have the number of terror incidents. There are still ones occurring such as the attack on an Israeli bus today in the Jordan Valley near Oja. Passengers on the bus had to be treated for trauma, and the bus itself was badly damaged.
A Palestinian armed with a knife penetrated the IDF guard post at Mishmar Hanegev at 4:30 am this morning and stabbed two soldiers. Even though the soldiers fought back, the terrorist escaped. The area remains under high alert with IDF soldiers along with ISA personnel hunting for the perpetrator.
TODAY’S BLOG
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Political Speculation Runs Rampant
Your humble servant was waiting until late this afternoon to write this blog in the hopes that there would be definitive news concerning what the national emergency unity government will look like. That unity government is now apparently 99.9% complete.
But alas, there is no definite news, only rank speculation.
The following is being reported but is completely unconfirmed:
*Yariv Levin, PM Netanyahu’s right hand man and chief negotiator, is set to become Speaker of the Knesset.
*Benny Gantz has signed off on:
—Israeli sovereignty over Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria
—a clause that says that if the Supreme Court rules that PM Netanyahu cannot serve as prime minister, a new election will be called when the corona virus begins to wane
—some mechanism that gives the Likud some say over judicial appointments while at the same time hands to Ministry of Justice over to Gantz’s cohorts
—PM Netanyahu remaining prime minister for 18 months
As I said, none of these items is confirmed, but negotiations are continuing late into the night to reach a final agreement.
President Rivlin has extended the deadline to form a government until Wednesday at midnight.
And so the intrigue continues . . .
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.