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Comments (0)The Iron Dome missile defense system successfully completed its final round of tests, Israel’s Defense Ministry said.
The tests, which include intercepting simultaneous rocket salvoes from different directions, were completed Monday in the Negev Desert.
Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. has built two systems thus far; Israel has not decided how many it will order. The systems are expected to be put into operation in November.
The system has been shown to be able to intercept the kind of rockets used against Israel by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza and by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Iron Dome was initiated after the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and the Gaza war in winter 2008-09, when Israeli border towns were hostage to the barrages of rockets.
The system is portable and can be moved quickly.
Lieberman: Spats Won’t Send Party Packing from Coalition
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said his Yisrael Beiteinu party will not leave the government, despite several disagreements.
During a news conference Monday, Lieberman criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not having more consideration for his largest coalition partner. With 15 seats, Yisrael Beiteinu is the second largest party in Netanyahu’s coalition.
Netanyahu and Lieberman were scheduled to meet later Monday to hash out their disagreements in private.
The downward spiral in relations between the two leaders began with Netanyahu’s decision to send Minister of Trade, Industry and Labor Benjamin Ben-Eliezer to Turkey for a meeting with its foreign minister, and continued in recent days with the state budget, the appointment of an interim United Nations envoy and a prospective conversion measure proposed by Lieberman’s party to fulfill an election promise to its supporters.
“We won’t quit the government, but we also have no intention of surrendering,” Lieberman told reporters.
“The party that most supports the government should not be the last considered in regards to the budget,” he said, referring to cuts in the departments headed by Yisrael Beiteinu ministers.
Israelis Mark Tisha B’Av
Israelis flocked to Jerusalem’s Old City to observe Tisha B’Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the Holy Temple.
A new poll released before Tisha B’Av showed that some 22 percent of Israelis would fast on the day and another 52 percent would refrain from going out with friends.
Israeli law requires that recreational spots be closed on Tisha B’Av; 18 percent of poll respondents called that “religious coercion.”
The Ynet-Gesher poll surveyed 505 Hebrew-speaking Jewish Israelis. It has a margin of error of 4.4 percent.
Jewish tradition says that the Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred; the poll asked which groups are the most hated in Israeli society. Fifty-four percent of respondents answered Arabs, 37 percent named the haredi Orthodox, 8 percent religious and 1 percent Tel Avivians.
Some 42 percent of respondents said they believed that the religious-secular issue is the worst source of tension in Israeli society, while 41 percent said it was the Jewish-Arab situation. Another 9 percent said the worst source of tension is between settlers and the rest of the country, while 8 percent said it was the tension between rich and poor.