Israel

Former Knesset Member Yoav Segalovitz announced Aug. 31 that he had joined the Arab the Ra’am party led by Mansour Abbas in an attempt to give the coalition of opposition parties enough votes to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oct. 27 Israeli election.

Professor Ada Yonath, the Israeli chemist who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her research into the structure and function of the ribosome — the tiny molecular machine inside cells that reads genetic instructions and uses them to build the proteins essential for life — died on Monday, Aug. 31, at 87.

The UK threatened to sanction Israelis involved in West Bank settlement expansion after the Jewish state’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of Ma’aleh Adumim.

Ten wounded Israeli soldiers traveled to South Africa recently for a recovery program combining support from local Jewish communities with a demanding trek through the Drakensberg mountain range.

The ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee called Israel’s decision not to pursue a criminal investigation of a 2024 Gaza strike that killed seven humanitarian workers “a miscarriage of justice.”

The West Bank settlement movement’s leadership joined with one of its most prominent defenders, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, in condemning an Israeli settler outpost set up in a Palestinian family’s yard in Qusra.

The plaza that became the center of Israel’s campaign to bring home the 251 captives Hamas seized on Oct.7, 2023 is now formally called “Hostages Square,” establishing a permanent reminder of the more than two-year struggle that ended with the return of the final hostage in January, 2026.

Israel has rejected a Gaza peace plan advanced with much fanfare by President Donald Trump, saying it did not really guarantee disarmament by Hamas. Israel said it would not withdraw from any part of Gaza until Hamas is thoroughly disarmed.

Israel’s Ministry of Defense has published the operational logs from the Israel Defense Forces Archives 20 years ago that documented the day of Hamas’ kidnapping of soldier Gilad Shalit into Gaza.

Two former Israeli hostages have wed, in the first marriage of hostages taken when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen were visiting Trufanov’s family on Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7 when they were attacked and abducted to Gaza.