Ahuvia Sandak, z”l, was tragically killed in a police-car chase in December 2020. The police car collided with the car Sandak was in with four other boys, causing it to overturn. The boys have been indicted for various charges. Honenu Attorney David HaLevi, who is representing one of the boys, petitioned the Jerusalem Magistrates Court to cancel his indictment because of claims of abuse of process. The petition itemizes how the Yehuda and Shomron Police and the Police Investigation Unit corrupted the investigation of the incident and attempted to blame Sandak’s death on his friends.

Attorney HaLevi cited how the PIU and the police handled the investigation together, despite the inherent conflict of interest: The PIU is the authority responsible for investigating police officers. He further explained how the State Attorney and the Attorney General arrived at the scene of the incident to silence public rage over the cover-up of the failures in the investigation.

Attorney HaLevi: “This outrageous case should never have been opened, and now it should be closed. Therefore, we petitioned the court with a reasoned request to cancel the indictment because of abuse of process. I sincerely hope that the court will agree to our request and put an end to the very injustice of prosecuting my client.”

Ahuvia Sandak, z”l, was killed on 6 Tevet, 5781 (December 21, 2020). Honenu has been representing the family and defending the many who are detained while demonstrating for a change in police behavior. Please click here for a list of posts connected to the case.

DM signs five administrative orders on holiday eve

On April 28, Yehuda and Shomron Police officers detained five Yehuda and Shomron residents who took part in searches for Binyamin Ahimeir, Hy”d, who was murdered while grazing a flock of sheep near the Malachei HaShalom farm in the Binyamin region. Some of the detainees are married and have children. The youngest is a 16-year-old minor. Later in the day, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant signed administrative detention orders against all five residents. The orders are for three, four, and six months. Honenu Attorneys Adi Keidar, Daniel Shimshilashvili, Shalom Ben-Shabbat, and Nati Rom are representing the detainees. The previous week, in a 4:00 AM raid, police forces detained eight residents on similar suspicions. All of them were released several hours later.

Honenu Director Shmuel (Zangi) Meidad strongly criticized the orders: “The current Israeli government broke a historical record for serving Jews with administrative orders. And this is during one of the toughest wars Israel has fought. The deafening silence of politicians in the nationalist camp in response to Defense Minister Gallant’s irrational actions only serves to intensify this crime and sends a message to our haters all over the world who, in turn, want to put Minister Gallant himself under administrative detention. Where can we hide our shame?”

On May 9, the Israel Police informed the attorneys representing the Beit El resident detained one week earlier on suspicion of killing a Hamas activist that they would not appeal the decision of the Jerusalem Magistrates Court to release him to his home. Honenu engaged the services of Attorney Ariel Atari and Attorney Asaf Gonen to represent the detainee.

The Israel Police had requested a seven-day remand extension, and they asked the court to delay his release to give them time to appeal the decision.

Attorney Atari reacted to the decision saying: “The [Jerusalem] Magistrates Court ordered the release of the detainee and thereby expressed what we had claimed from the beginning: The Beit El resident suspected of killing a Hamas terrorist is innocent. We expect the GSS to do some soul-searching and direct their energy to interrogating Hamas terrorists, not innocent citizens.”

Attorney Gonen added, “As we claimed from the first moment, there is absolutely no evidential basis for the charges, and certainly not for detention. We thank the court for accepting our claims and exercising judicial review.”

Legal campaign for Israeli citizens under sanctions continues
In February, the governments of several countries, among them the US, the UK, France, and New Zealand imposed sanctions on several Jewish farm owners in Yehuda and Shomron based on claims that they had attacked Arabs. Subsequently, the bank accounts and credit cards of the farmers were frozen. Additionally, France and New Zealand announced that they would bar the entry of several dozen Yehuda and Shomron residents to their countries. In an effort to have the sanctions lifted, Attorney Nick Kaufman has been working on behalf of Honenu with the governments that imposed them.

Attorney Kaufman also wrote a letter to the Israeli Foreign Ministry asking how the government of Israel plans to react to the sanctions, which, in his opinion, are an attack on all Yehuda and Shomron residents. He stated that France and New Zealand did not cite names, and therefore the move is detrimental to all Yehuda and Shomron residents as in the event that they plan a trip, they will not know ahead of time whether or not their entry to those countries will be refused. Attorney Nick Kaufman requested the assistance of Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz in clarifying the identity of the Israeli citizens who are under sanctions.

The ministry replied that newly-appointed Foreign Minister Katz is studying the matter and will issue an appropriate response. Attorney Kaufman expressed satisfaction that the matter is being handled by the highest echelons of the government and hopes that Foreign Minister Katz and the National Security Council will raise the subject with their counterparts in New Zealand and France as soon as possible.

As the President of Israel, you envision an era of “normalization” with Saudi Arabia That would sit well with Israel.

However, “normalization” does not exist in law or diplomacy.

Saudi Arabia, kingpin of the Arab League of Nations, has led an active state of war on Zionism since the first day of Israel’s creation in 1948, in accordance with the charter of the Arab League of Nations, which promotes the liquidation of the Jews in Palestine.

The same goes for the Saudi proxy, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, which in 1964 issued a charter for the annihilation of the Jews of Palestine, a charter which was supposed to have been cancelled at the outset of the Middle East peace process in 1993 – but was not.

In the normalization, will you ask the Saudis to take the following steps?

1. Cancellation of the state of war with Israel
2. Directing Saudi-funded UNRWA education to encourage peace education by removing Palestinian texts and teachers who continue to preach war against Jews. The PA schools feature a 4^thgrade textbook dedicated to the legacy of Dalal Al-Mughrabi, a woman terrorist who commandeered a bus and murdered more than 30 passengers, including 13 children.
3. Removal the PA war curriculum

https://israelbehindthenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-unrwa-education-curriculum-upate.pdf.

4. Directing Saudi funds for UNRWA to settle descendants of Arab refugees from the 1948 war, who now dwell in 59 “temporary” UN refugee camps under the pretense of the “right of return” to a pre-1948 that no longer exists. At this point in time, the Palestinian Authority instils in the minds of every child that their only future lies in villages which were left in 1948.

https://israelbehindthenews.com/2019/09/27/a-solution-for-five-million-descendants-fromcuure-arab-refugees-from-1948-who-still-dwell-in-59-unrwa-refugee-camps/

4. Demanding the repeal of the PA law which provides a salary for life for anyone who murders a Jew. This is a legalized incentive to murder.

https://jcpa.org/paying-salaries-terrorists-contradicts-palestinian-vows-peaceful-intentions/

5. Will the Saudis ask the PA to remove new PA maps which obliterate Israel? A policy of normalization would present UN maps which portray all UN members in good standing, including Israel.

https://israelbehindthenews.com/2022/09/24/revealing-maps-the-palestinian-vision-as-taught-in-unrwa-schools/

6. Will Saudi aid to Middle East Studies programs at universities around the world now require the removal of curricula which denies the Jewish connection to the land of Israel?

In short, do you believe that Saudi normalization must remove the vestiges of war from Saudi policy?

*Since 1987, David Bedein has directed the Israel Resource News Agency and the Nahum Bedein  Center for Near East Policy Research. He is the author of Genesis of the Palestinian Authority and Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict: UNSRWA Policies Reconsidered.

 The office of President Herzog confirms  the receipt of this letter and promises a response. After the President of Israel indeed responds, this letter and his response will be published in a major publication.

The International Criminal Court went a long way towards delegitimizing the entire international community when it issued arrest warrants for both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas’s monstrous chief Yahya Sinwar. This was not only an appalling moral equivalence between the two leaders, but between Israel and Hamas as well.

In its total moral bankruptcy and institutional corruption, the ICC only contributed to the long-standing and ongoing disintegration of an international community that claims to uphold the values of human rights and democracy. The ICC’s decision morally demolishes the U.N., of which the ICC is a child. It does little good to the E.U., which is a close relative of the U.N. In effect, the international community’s moral credibility has committed suicide.

No one with any common sense will ever again accept the legitimacy of the ICC. Millions now disdain an institution that believes the genocidal massacre of Oct. 7 was as legitimate as Israel’s fulfillment of its duty to defend its people. They see that Israel is doing everything it can to avoid civilian casualties and facilitate humanitarian aid. They also see that this counts for nothing with a corrupt international establishment.

Millions know that Hamas is a monster that subjects the society it rules to the law of terror. They know Hamas wants to slaughter all of world Jewry because of Hamas’s fanatical religious hate. They also know that Israel is the modern manifestation of the civilization that gave birth to the West’s Judeo-Christian tradition; that Israel rose from the Holocaust against all odds and built a nation that benefits the world.

Ironically, the ICC’s nihilistic equation of Israel and Hamas came shortly after the death of one of the primary supporters of the Gaza monster: President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran. Thanks to this coincidence, we saw the international community’s moral corruption in full. It rushed to offer weeping condolences for the “Butcher of Tehran” who killed, tortured and oppressed tens of thousands of Iranian women, dissidents and homosexuals. The glorious democracies of Russia, China, Pakistan and Lebanon all but erected mourning tents for the fiend and the E.U. cried bitter tears.

Many of the same nations have expressed their adoration of the ICC’s demented persecution of the Jewish state. Fortunately, U.S. President Joe Biden had the good sense to call the ICC’s decision “outrageous.” Even Secretary Antony Blinken of the notoriously anti-Israel State Department denounced it. To its credit, Germany did so as well.

Many of the haters, of course, are driven by their membership in the international establishment. Benjamin Netanyahu is not and does not want to be a member of this clique, and rightfully so. So, they hate Netanyahu. They hate that he keeps winning elections and hate that he wants to win the war against Hamas. They hate that he ignores their shrieking denunciations and continues to fight. He shows their essential impotence and they can’t stand it.

They are likely aware of the fact that this is unjust. Perhaps they even unconsciously admire Netanyahu. After all, he is a democratically elected leader, which the snobs of the ICC are not. He has always led his people as they want him to: in a besieged but heroic manner. Netanyahu represents a people with 3,000 years of history that has survived all the ancient empires that have passed into nothingness, as today’s international elite someday will as well.

Sinwar, in contrast, is a serial killer, a terrorist, a child murderer, a rapist and an oppressor of his own people. To equate him with Netanyahu is like the neo-Nazis who claim the bombing of Dresden was worse than Auschwitz. But today’s neo-Nazis wrap themselves in the cloak of anti-racism and human rights. They declare that the rest of us are colonialists, racists and oppressors.

In the name of this dark religion, they want Netanyahu to be the sacrificial lamb, an offering to the gods of human rights and the demons of antisemitism. They want him to be the new Dreyfus. Fortunately, this is impossible, because Netanyahu and his people have an army. The haters may not like this, but there is nothing they can do about it. No wonder they hate us so much.

The Israeli Defence Forces revealed a crazy drone footage of armed Hamas militants next to UN vehicles at an UNRWA compound in eastern Rafah. The drone footage shows three armed militants roaming and were spotted by Givati Brigade troops on Saturday. IDF claimed that in one clip a gunman opened fire inside the UNRWA complex. The Israeli Forces urged the United Nations to investigate the connection between UNRWA’s logistics centres and Hamas operatives.