How Bibi News Today

How Bibi's judicial reform was stopped in its tracks

Get email notification for articles from Amos Harel Follow May. 2, 2021 5:59 AM The Lag Ba’omer hillula that ended in mass casualties on Mount Meron was not the only large gathering that was scheduled to take place in the Galilee last week. Tens of thousands of members of Israel’s Druze community had planned to visit the grave of Nabi Shuaib in Kfar Hittim on April 25, for the Habi Shuaib festival. But the Druze leadership canceled the pilgrimage in the wake of heavy pressure from the comm...

Get email notification for articles from Josh Breiner Follow May. 1, 2021 11:54 PM At noon on Friday, nothing at the foot of the stairs where the Mount Meron tragedy happened suggested that less than 12 hours earlier, 45 people had been crushed to death. All that was left in the place that had become a death trap were dozens of empty plastic bottles, some papers and other trash. “Everyone suffocated to death, no one bled,” Netanel Knafo, one of the first medics to reach the scene, told the...

What we know at the end of a week of intense coalition talks between party leaders

Apr. 30, 2021 7:26 AM Witnesses who were at Mount Meron at the time of the deadly stampede that left 44 dead and over 150 injured recounted the horror of what was meant to be a festive and jovial Lag BaOmer celebration.  Tens of thousands of people participated Thursday in the annual Lag Baomer festivities at the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, making it the largest event held in Israel since the coronavirus pandemic broke out last year. Since the site was so densely attended, search and re...

Get email notification for articles from Assa Sasson Follow Apr. 29, 2021 2:32 AM Michal Mor, a psychologist by training, says it all began in the Second Lebanon War. “My husband got a call-up order, they handed him an M-16 and he went into Lebanon with a gun and a steel gunsite. It was terrible. At the end of the day, the reserve soldier is the mainstay of the army and he needs to regain his operational capabilities, which takes time he doesn’t have.” In those days Mor was developing a ...

Get email notification for articles from Yossi Verter Follow Apr. 29, 2021 5:47 AM The explanations for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s flip-flop range from political (an effort to restore a sense of sanity to the system and control damage in the negotiations with Naftali Bennett); to the legal (his panic that the High Court of Justice was poised not just to void the appointment of Ofir Akunis as justice minister, but would rip him to shreds and perhaps even hint at incapacitation), to t...

Follow Apr. 29, 2021 With less than a week left for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cobble together a new government, negotiating teams from Yamina, Yesh Atid and New Hope held intensive talks on Thursday in an attempt to reach an agreement on forming an alternative coalition. Yamina and New Hope are hoping to reach an understanding before Netanyahu’s mandate to form a government expires, possibly as soon as Saturday – but Yesh Atid is opposed to this. Yamina and Yesh Atid have therefo...

PA to decide this week whether to defer parliamentary elections – the first in 14 years – officially because Israel has not consented to voting in East Jerusalem, but unofficially, because Fatah might lose, some sources say

Apr. 28, 2021 1:35 PM Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus late media adviser told police investigators in 2017 that Netanyahu was involved in efforts, while he was finance minister, to obtain permission for Israeli Hollywood entertainment mogul Arnon Milchan to purchase a stake in Channel 10 television, in videotaped testimony aired on Channel 13 Tuesday night following a stormy legal battle. The testimony is potentially relevant to one of the criminal cases underway against the prime minister, ...