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Comments (0)The United Nations voted to extend the mandate of its peacekeeping operation in southern Lebanon for another year.
The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Monday to keep the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon on patrol in southern Lebanon on the border with Israel until Aug. 31, 2011.
The council based its decision on what it considers the unstable situation on the border between Lebanon and Israel.
UNIFIL has been deployed in southern Lebanon since 1978. Its mandate was strengthened in 2006 following the Second Lebanon War to monitor the U.N.-brokered cease-fire. Nearly 12,000 UNIFIL personnel are serving in the area.
On Aug. 3, Israeli and Lebanese troops fired at each other after Israel began trimming a tree on its side of the Blue Line, which demarcates the border between the two countries. An Israeli soldier was killed and one was injured in the shooting. Three Lebanese soldiers and a journalist were killed.
New Jersey Woman Dies in Nepal Crash
A Jewish woman from New Jersey died in a plane crash in Nepal on her 30th birthday.
Irina Shekhets reportedly traveled to Nepal on a spiritual journey and was heading to a hiking trip to a Mount Everest base camp when the 15-seat, twin-engine plane crashed Aug. 23 about 50 miles south of Kathmandu. Fourteen people were killed, including four Americans.
Shekhets was a graduate of Brooklyn College Law School and recently had taken the bar exam. She was on leave from her job as an analyst for JP Morgan Chase.
Volunteers from the ZAKA International Rescue Unit left Israel Monday night to assist in the recovery and identification of Shekhets’ badly charred remains.
The decision to send a team was made in cooperation with Chabad House in Katmandu, which is coordinating the recovery efforts with local authorities, and the Israeli Foreign Office’s situation room, which assisted the team in obtaining the necessary visas.
Israeli backpackers in Chabad House Katmandu ahead of Rosh Hashanah will join the ZAKA volunteers in their search of the crash site.
Israeli Envoy: South African Bias Against Israel ‘Disappointing’
Israel’s envoy to South Africa said the country’s recent bias against Israel is not helping to advance peace in the Mideast.
“It is disappointing that the last few months have seen a disturbing and growing tendency by South Africa aligning itself with those critical of Israel,” Dov Segev-Steinberg told about 1,000 delegates attending a meeting of the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies, the country’s Jewish umbrella organization. “[It] does little to advance the cause of peace nor South Africa’s contribution towards it.”
Paul Mashatile, the South African deputy minister of arts and culture and Gauteng provincial chairman of the ruling African National Congress, was in the audience.
The marked deterioration between Israel and South Africa began following Israel’s interception of a Turkish Gaza-bound flotilla at the end of May. South Africa blamed Israel for the death of nine activists.
South Africa issued a demarche against Israel, an exceptionally strong diplomatic condemnation, followed by the temporary withdrawal of its ambassador to Israel—something no other country did, not even Turkey.
A period of difficulty during the Gaza war at the beginning of 2009 had not disturbed the policy of “pragmatic engagement” between the two countries that included cultural and economic programs and exchanges.
Steinberg said he had hoped for relations between the two countries to improve when he began his term of office two years ago, “but this has not been fulfilled.”
Rabbi David Rosen, director of interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee, in his keynote address said the Middle East conflict had not evolved out of religion but was a territorial dispute. Rosen said, however, that it was now being “religionized,” calling the conflict “a war of the godly and goodly against evil and the godless.”
Other speakers included Eliseo Neuman, director of the Africa Institute of the American Jewish Committee, and Zev Krengel, national chairman of the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies.