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ISRAEL

GOOD NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Israel is at war with Hamas, but in the laboratories, hospitals and scientific institutes the work to ameliorate suffering and enhance life expectancy and quality continues apace as Michael Ordman catalogs.

To Israel’s brave citizens and defense forces is this stanza from Psalm 91:

“For he will command his angels concerning you
    to guard you in all your ways;
 they will lift you up in their hands,
    so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.
 You will tread on the lion and the cobra;
    you will trample the great lion and the serpent.”

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Trials for Covid-19 wonder treatment. The EXO-CD24 Covid treatment (see here) invented by doctors at Israel’s Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center, is about to begin Phase 2 trials in Greece on 90 patients. If successful, the treatment could be available to treat patients in India, Brazil etc. by end 2021.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-promising-precision-covid-drug-starting-trial-in-greece-next-week/

How Covid-19 fools the immune system. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have produced the most detailed analysis yet of how SARS-Cov-2 stops cells from making the proteins needed to alert the immune system. When Covid-19 is finally detected, the immune system’s cytokine storm response is too massive.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/why-does-covid-make-people-so-sick-so-quickly-israeli-geneticist-has-an-answer/

Post-Pfizer vaccination study. Tel Aviv University scientists conducted the world’s first digital monitoring study to check concerns about the side effects of the SARS-Cov-2 vaccine. Almost all 160 Israelis monitored showed changes to vital signs (heart rates, blood pressure etc.). These all returned to normal 3 days later.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-research-explains-post-vaccine-grogginess-and-why-its-not-worrying/

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.06.21256587v1

Israeli vaccine news. Israel’s Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) anticipates commencing Phase 3 of its coronavirus vaccine trials soon – probably in Argentina as 30,000 unvaccinated volunteers are required. A new trial may also be launched to test if the two-shot vaccine could be combined into a higher dose single shot.

https://nocamels.com/2021/05/israeli-covid-19-vaccine-single-dose-redo-trials/

First US patients for Israeli blood clot remover. (TY Atid-EDI) The first US patients have been treated with the Tigertriever from Israel’s Rapid Medical. The device helps neurosurgeons to remove blood clots and restore blood flow to the brain following an ischemic (stroke) event. It was approved by the US FDA in March.

https://www.cathlabdigest.com/content/first-us-ischemic-stroke-patients-treated-rapid-medicals-novel-clot-retriever  https://news.yahoo.com/wellstar-docs-tool-remove-blood-223600879.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjUfE_DZIdM   https://vimeo.com/248700464

Transformative treatment for Cystic Fibrosis. Israel’s SpliSense (see here), is developing mRNA-altering therapies for cystic fibrosis (CF) and other genetic pulmonary diseases. SpliSense founder Professor Batsheva Kerem was part of the Hebrew University team that identified the CFTR gene and developed the CF therapy.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3907693,00.html

Molecule protects implants. Researchers from Tel Aviv University have developed an active molecule (SNV) that can significantly suppress inflammation and resulting bone destruction following dental implants. SNV was originally developed to treat Alzheimer’s disease but was tested on implants by a dentist for her PhD thesis.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/tu-tfa051121.php

Protein from mosquitos could treat brain disorders. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have used a light-sensitive protein derived from mosquitos to regulate the pathways connecting parts of the brain. They believe that the discovery may lead to treatments for neurological disorders such as epilepsy. 

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-lab-switches-off-brain-connectors-boosting-efforts-to-treat-disorders/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0896627321001616?dgcid=author

Breakthrough app warns of heart failure. Israel’s Cordio Medical (see here previously) has been granted breakthrough device designation by the US FDA for its HearO smartphone app that gives early warning of congestive heart failure by detecting subtle changes in voice tone. It could save millions of lives every year.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/spotlight/startup-founded-by-top-israeli-cardiologist-detects-heart-disease-via-smartphone/

Accessible cardiac ultrasound. (TY ToI) Israel’s UltraSight has developed an ultrasound device and AI software that allows medical professionals to perform timely and accurate cardiac ultrasound tests regardless of their sonography (medical ultrasound) training. UltraSight won the TCT 2020 Innovation Competition.

https://www.ultrasight.com/ultrasight-raises-13-million-to-bring-a  https://www.ultrasight.com/

https://scienmag.com/onsight-medical-wins-tct-connect-2020-shark-tank-innovation-competition/

More than just a wristband monitor. (TY Atid-EDI) Europe’s CE Mark has been awarded to the Remote Patient AI Monitoring Platform developed by Israel’s Bio-Beat. The system has recently been radically upgraded (see previous) and now automatically and continuously tracks 15 cardio-pulmonary vital signs.

https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/biobeat-s-ai-powered-remote-patient-monitoring-platform-receives-a-full-ce-mark-883148022.html   https://www.bio-beat.com/

It pays to be healthy. Israel’s UVTAL Health has developed Rumble – an app that uses social, behavioral and economic incentives to help over one million Israelis take exercise. The app records the number of steps walked and converts that into tokens that can be spent at many shops and websites.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3907283,00.html  https://www.rumble.co.il/

Trumpets and Tank Engines: A Turning Point in Gaza? by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17372/turning-point-in-gaza

Hamas is no match for the IDF and could be quickly and much more cheaply defeated by blunt and crushing military force were it not for one thing — the Israeli need to minimise loss of civilian life. Hamas know that.

Over many years of conflict in Gaza, the majority of the world’s media have enthusiastically reported the deaths of Palestinian civilians as though they were the deliberate object of Israel’s callous and uncaring way of war. This blatantly false propaganda has been taken up by Hamas supporters and “useful idiots” in the West…. Human rights groups around the world have been doing the same.

The wilful ignorance combined with malice has always been breathtaking. Every commission of inquiry determined Israel’s guilt before it even met for the first time.

Every debate and vote has overwhelmingly and of course falsely affirmed Israel’s supposed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile Hamas’s actual multiple war crimes have been brushed aside.

[T]he IDF did all they could to ensure minimum loss of civilian life by selecting targets where the lowest levels of innocents would be harmed…. As in previous conflicts in Gaza the IDF has made radio broadcasts in Arabic, sent SMS messages and even phoned civilians inside the strip to warn them of impending strikes….Gazans have given interviews confirming this.

Many in the media, human rights groups and international bodies have rushed to characterise all civilian casualties (other than those inflicted by Hamas of course) as war crimes. But the Geneva Conventions disagree. Inflicting civilian casualties is not illegal provided a military operation is necessary for the prosecution of a war, they are not disproportionate to the planned military gain and that combatant commanders do not intentionally target civilians while doing all they can to avoid hitting them.

The media takes reports from the Gaza health ministry as authoritative and objective. That is disingenuous and they know it. The health ministry is controlled by Hamas and follows their every order.

Despite all of this, as the media unceasingly show us, the real victims in this campaign have indeed been Gaza civilians. But they usually get the cause wrong. Every one is due to Hamas’s unprovoked aggression against Israel. None would have occurred without it.

If Western governments, international bodies and human rights groups are genuinely interested in avoiding suffering in Gaza, they should start now, striving to end Hamas’s reign of terror rather than support it by parroting their baleful narrative.

During an operation in Gaza last week, the Israel Defence Forces attacked a Hamas tunnel complex with 12 squadrons of 160 combat planes striking over 150 targets with hundreds of bunker-busting JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munitions] in less than an hour. Although the battle damage assessment is still underway, the raid destroyed perhaps the most critical element of Hamas infrastructure, wiping out vast stocks of munitions and likely killing dozens if not hundreds of fighters. This was a hammer blow to Hamas and may prove to be a turning point in the conflict. It also sent a powerful message to Iran and Hizballah, foretelling the consequences of an assault on Israel with their arsenal of tens of thousands of missiles in southern Lebanon.

AN AMAZING STORY AMID THE CHAOS

There was one remarkable story amid all the chaos. A 3-year-old girl was badly wounded in a rocket attack in Holon. Her mother was also injured as well as her twin sister. But the girl’s injury was serious – her carotid artery had been partly severed by a piece of shrapnel. They were in a car at the time. The mother shouted for help and in another car a woman and her husband jumped out and rushed to their assistance. It turned out the woman was one of her customers (she was a hairdresser). The woman took her head-covering, called a mitpachat, which religious women wear, and bandaged the wound. They then started running. A moment later, they heard a loud explosion. It was the car in which the woman and her husband had been traveling. It had exploded, having been hit by shrapnel from the rocket, unbeknownst to them.

So they not only saved the little girl, the little girl saved them.

David Isaac

AP Had Advance Notice of Israeli Air Strike on Gaza Building, Was Able to Safely Evacuate All Journalists By Philip Klein

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ap-had-advanced-notice-of-israeli-air-strike-on-gaza-building-was-able-to-safely-evacuate-all-journalists/

On Saturday, Israel struck a building in Gaza housing Hamas assets that also happened to have offices for the Associated Press. Why the AP was sharing an office building with a U.S. State Department designated terrorist group that is known to use civilians and journalists as human shields is a subject worth exploring. But here is the full statement by the AP, which includes two important details (which I’ve highlighted in bold):

We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza. They have long known the location of our bureau and knew journalists were there. We received a warning that the building would be hit.

We are seeking information from the Israeli government and are engaged with the U.S. State Department to try to learn more.

This is an incredibly disturbing development. We narrowly avoided a terrible loss of life. A dozen AP journalists and freelancers were inside the building and thankfully we were able to evacuate them in time.

The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today.

So to be clear, Israel warned the journalists, who had sufficient time to get out safely, and then proceeded to liquidate a legitimate enemy target.

Moral Clarity Versus Moral Depravity in Israel and Gaza | Opinion Josh Hammer

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/moral-clarity-versus-moral-depravity-in-israel-and-gaza-opinion/ar-BB1gI5Rz

Nationally syndicated radio host Dennis Prager has often observed that if the Israelis were to lay down their guns, Israel would be destroyed tomorrow, but if the Palestinians were to lay down their guns, there would be peace tomorrow. It has always been thus.

The latest flare-up of violence between Israelis and Palestinians is no different. The proximate causes are a thorny combination of an abstruse housing dispute in northeastern Jerusalem, deceitful Palestinian slander about an ostensible threat to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the destabilizing nature of Israel’s current domestic political morass and the contemporaneous American appeasement in Vienna of the Palestinians’ preeminent jihad bankroller, the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the immediate aggressors, as per usual, are clear: Hamas, the internationally recognized Gaza-based terrorist outfit whose founding charter calls for the murder of every Jew worldwide, and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, ruled in profoundly corrupt fashion by serial jihad-inciter Mahmoud Abbas, a Holocaust denialist now in the 16th year of his four-year term.

The result has been the worst bout of bloodshed since the last full-scale Israel-Hamas war in 2014. Hamas has fired thousands of rockets into the Jewish state, seeking—and, tragically, occasionally succeeding—to inflict maximal harm upon Israel’s civilian population. Hamas’ rockets do not discriminate on the basis of age, race or religion: Victims include an Israel Defense Forces soldier, a 6-year-old boy in the oft-targeted Gaza border town of Sderot and a 32-year-old Indian national in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. One would be waiting in vain for Black Lives Matter, or other leading institutional wokesters and intersectional shakedown artists, to reconcile such calamities with their professed principles.

Anti-Israel Forces Encouraged by Biden’s Weakness It has taken the Democrats all of four months in power to screw up the Middle East, and the good guys in the region are not pleased or inclined to play along.by Christian Whiton

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/anti-israel-forces-encouraged-biden%E2%80%99s-weakness-185215

Four years of relative peace in the Middle East have been shattered by a conflict between Hamas and Israel, which began when Hamas bombarded Jerusalem. The Iranian-backed force that rules Gaza then expanded its target list to other Israeli cities.

Why now? The Middle East and particularly the Levant had been on the mend since then-President Donald Trump took the handcuffs off U.S.-led forces in 2017 and allowed them to all but obliterate ISIS. Trump also knocked off balance the terrorism-exporting Iranian regime by curtailing its finances and confronting it with an aggressive military posture in the Arabian Gulf.

The biggest Trump breakthrough came with the Abraham Accords, which achieved a historic breakthrough between Israelis and Arabs, with the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

Unfortunately, the new Biden administration refused simply to accept this new and beneficial status quo upon entering office. Biden officials set about immediately to let Iran out of the doghouse. The administration is set on resurrecting the 2015 nuclear deal that showered Tehran with money and still allowed it to keep the key parts of a nuclear program it today is using to enrich uranium far beyond what is necessary for peaceful purposes.

Biden officials also put the Palestinians, and therefore Hamas (aka, the Muslim Brotherhood), back on the payroll with $235 million in payments. Trump had cut them off in 2018, realizing they funded terrorism. In restoring the funds, the administration said it “wanted to restore credible engagement” between the Palestinians and Israelis. Certainly, it did: nothing is more credible than a rocket attack targeting civilians in one’s capital.

For the Sake of Peace, Israel Must Rout Hamas By Bret Stephens

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opinion/gaza-hamas-israel.html

As of this writing, terrorists in Gaza — the word “terrorist” fits people who take indiscriminate aim at civilians to achieve political goals — have fired some 1,750 rockets at Israel since Monday.

That’s a number worth pausing over, and not just because it has had the effect of overwhelming Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense. Gaza is often said to be sealed off and utterly destitute. Yet Hamas, which rules Gaza, seems not to have had too much trouble amassing this kind of arsenal, or too many qualms employing it in a way it knew was sure to incur a heavy Israeli response.

The usual rule in life is that if you throw the first punch you can’t complain if you’re counterpunched. The test of Western policy and public opinion is whether they will let Hamas break this rule.

That’s a test the Biden administration has so far passed: Both the president and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have issued statements stressing that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Good. It’s more than can be said for progressives such as Bernie Sanders, who blamed “the irresponsible actions of government-allied right-wing extremists in Jerusalem” for the fighting without adding a word of condemnation for Hamas.

Now let’s hope the administration’s attitude lasts. The tactics of Hamas are to house its arsenals in schools and mosques, set up headquarters in the basement of hospitals and fire its missiles from sites next to crowded apartment buildings and hotels housing foreign journalists.

The idea is either to keep Israel from returning fire or, if it does, reap the propaganda benefits from televised and tweeted pictures of wrecked buildings and human casualties and “disproportionate” Israeli-Palestinian death counts that obscure the fact that one side is doing what it can to protect civilian lives and the other side is doing what it can to endanger them.

On Eastern Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah and Israel East and West are not simple geographic terms as they are in the United States.by Moshe Phillips

https://www.jns.org/opinion/on-eastern-jerusalem-sheikh-jarrah-and-israel/

CNN ran a news story on May 9 with the headline “Israeli Supreme Court delays hearing on Palestinian evictions from East Jerusalem neighborhood.” This followed an official press statement issued on May 7 by the U.S. State Department that reported “concern” about “evictions in East Jerusalem, settlement activity, home demolitions and acts of terrorism … .”

The catch? The area in the news is not in “East Jerusalem” at all. What’s more, there is not now, nor has there ever been in history a political entity known as “East Jerusalem.”A glance at any map of the city shows that the neighborhood Sheik Jarrah, including the parts also widely known in Hebrew as Shimon HaTzadik for centuries, is not in the capital’s east. It is in the north, about 1.25 miles north of the Western Wall, the Kotel.

In fact, this area is farther west than numerous well-known parts of Jerusalem, such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (construction began in 1918) and Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus (construction began in 1934).

The term “East Jerusalem” is an artificial construct that supporters of the Arab cause use in their propaganda in order to make it appear as if that part of the city is an intrinsically Arab area that Jews are illegally entering. In reality, there are Jewish neighborhoods throughout the eastern, western, northern and southern parts of Jerusalem. It’s a pity when American politicians and news outlets play along and use such geographically inaccurate and politically loaded language.

East and West in Israel are not simple geographic terms as they are in the United States, where Northeast Philadelphia, the Upper East Side in Manhattan and East L.A. are used to denote neighborhoods and sections of a city. In Israel, where Judea and Samaria have been labeled as the West Bank, things are different. The term West Bank was created by Arab propagandists to de-emphasize the area’s inherent Jewishness and to disassociate the land from the State of Israel. East Jerusalem was similarly invented.

This Time Israel Should Finish Off Hamas Roger L. Simon

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/this-time-israel-should-finish-off-hamas_3815825.html?

Sometimes when psychopaths, religious and otherwise—people whose charter urges the faithful to “kill all Jews,” even Jewish trees, whatever that is or could be—rain missiles on your country again and again, try to destroy you any way they can, dig tunnels under your property, loft flaming balloons over your schools and farms, fly drones toward your airports and even nuclear installations, it’s time to say “enough!”

Or, in the local parlance, “dayenu.”

It is time to put paid once and for all to the evil terror organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad that have been attacking the heartland of Israel virtually ever since Israel freely gave Gaza to the Palestinians, first to the Palestinian Authority and then to Hamas after they murdered the PA officials in a mini-civil war and took over the territory as a fanatical dictatorship.

Every few years Hamas (and their now-billionaire leadership) seizes on something, some issue on the Temple Mount, a neighborhood where, in their view, too many Jews are moving in, and start a missile barrage, aiming to hit as many innocent civilians as possible and ignite the “Arab street.”

The current barrage, thanks largely to Iran, is the biggest ever, with modern weapons that can reach the entire Jewish state with significant payloads.

Several times the Israel Defense Force has been constrained to enter Gaza to put a stop to these barrages.

That appears to be happening again now. At this writing the IDF seems on the edge of a ground incursion, if not actually over that edge.

Whatever the case—this time they should finish the job. Finally.

Opinion: Almost Nothing You’ve Heard About Evictions in Jerusalem Is True Neutral application of property law becomes an international incident because a landlord is a Jew. By Avi Bell and Eugene Kontorovich

https://www.wsj.com/articles/almost-nothing-youve-heard-about-evictions-in-jerusalem-is-true-11621019410?

Hamas never needs a special occasion to bombard Israel with rockets. Yet the progressive narrative connects the terrorist group’s current onslaught to eviction proceedings in Israeli courts concerning a few properties in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren claim these are stark human-rights violations by the Israeli government, and illegal under international law. Even the State Department expressed “serious concern.”

The truth about Sheikh Jarrah is the opposite. It is an ordinary property dispute between private parties. The Jewish claimants’ ownership of the few plots of land has been confirmed repeatedly in court, following laws that apply equally regardless of ethnicity. Israeli courts have gone out of their way to avoid evicting the Palestinian residents who haven’t paid rent for half a century.

In the case now before Israel’s Supreme Court, the owner is an Israeli corporation with Jewish owners whose chain of title is documented back to an original purchase in 1875. Until 1948, the neighborhood now known as Sheikh Jarrah was home to both Jewish and Arab communities. Jordan invaded Israel in 1948 and occupied half of Jerusalem, expelling every one of its Jewish inhabitants and seizing their property.

When Israel reunited Jerusalem and ended the Jordanian occupation in 1967, it had to decide what to do with these properties. In the many cases in which Jordan had officially transferred the title of Jewish-owned properties to Palestinians, Israel respected the new titles—and still does—even though they are based on forcible takings in a war of aggression followed by ethnic cleansing against Jews. Where title had never been transferred, however, Israel returned properties to their owners. Critics of Israel claim that Arabs can’t recover property under the same law, but the law is entirely neutral—it is simply the case that Jordan took property from Jews, not Palestinians.

Title to the properties in dispute in Sheikh Jarrah was never given by Jordan to Palestinians, so Israeli law respects the unbroken title of the plaintiffs. This case has nothing to do with ethnicity or religion. The only discrimination in the legal treatment of Sheikh Jarrah property is historic, by Jordan, and against Jews to the benefit of Palestinians.

The plaintiff and its predecessors in title have spent four decades in court seeking to recover possession of the properties. In every case, courts have ruled in favor of the owners. In the latest lawsuits, the courts ruled that four of the eight defendants were squatters with no legal rights in the land, and the remaining four were descendants of tenants who had never paid rent.

Nevertheless, Israeli courts have treated the Palestinian squatters and leaseholders alike as “protected tenants,” and would shield them from eviction indefinitely if they paid rent. They have refused to do so.

The laws involved are the same as any landlord would invoke. There is only one objection in this case: the owners are Jews. Western progressives have elevated the desire of some Arabs not to have Jewish neighbors into a human right and a legal entitlement that even the Jewish state must protect.