RUTHFULLY YOURS

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Israel, a nation of about 9,400,000 people gets more news coverage than Brazil with a population of 211,140,729 people. Unfortunately, most of it is biased and low information, particularly during a war occasioned by barbaric enemies. As Michael Ordman details in weekly postings, what the biased media ignores is the outsize and remarkable contributions Israel makes in science, medicine, technology, agriculture and water recycling and preservation, to name a handful, to the entire world. Read it all. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
On a mission. Technion alumna Maya Shnur is a business manager at Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. “When the sirens start and I take my little boy down into the bomb shelter, I say ‘thank you Rafael for saving our lives.’” Maya contributes to Israel’s security and raises the profile of women in the workplace.
https://technionuk.org/news-post/on-a-mission-a-woman-who-protects-her-country-her-family-her-home/  
 
Cowboys don’t run away. (TY Israel21c) There are some 50 cattle ranches in Israel’s Golan Heights, under fire from Hezbollah rockets and drones. One, Merom Golan, has around 1,500 head of cattle. Shay Zerbib owns another ranch; he says, “Someone has to take care of the animals; they need to get fed no matter what,”
https://www.israel21c.org/cowboys-herding-cattle-under-hezbollah-rocket-fire/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-sazvRNUGM
 
Doctors answer the call. (TY Yanky) Since Oct 7, some 400 doctors and 30 health professionals from the US and other countries have arrived in Israel to assist in treating the large number of injured or to fill in for Israeli medical staff who are called to military duty.  Read about five of them here.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/foreign-doctors-answer-the-call-to-help-in-israels-hospitals-and-rehab-centers/
 
Christian support for the South. (TY Yanky) The International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem visited the south and asked Rafi Babian, security chief of the Sadot Regional Council, what he needed. “Paramedic kits for all 16 communities under my watch, please,” he replied. The life-saving kits have now been delivered.
https://www.icej.org/blog/icej-donates-paramedic-kits-to-sadot-negev-region/
 
Montana retreat helps heal IDF vets. (TY Yanky) Healing in Nature (HIN) runs weeklong retreats on an isolated Montana ranch for IDF combat vets traumatized by their Gaza experience. Tel Aviv University psychiatrist Dr Roi Sar-el, uses biofeedback to track soldiers’ vital signs before, during and after the ranch trip.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/weeklong-retreat-in-montana-ranch-aims-to-heal-idf-vets-from-war-traumas/
https://www.hin-group.org/
 
Underwater protection. The IDF Navy’s Underwater Missions Unit (Yaltam), protects Israel’s maritime borders, performs complex rescue operations, and neutralizes underwater threats. Since Oct 7, its missions included neutralizing and removing vehicles, devices, and weaponry from attempted sea infiltrations.
https://www.jns.org/deep-dive-into-israels-elite-underwater-unit/
 
How female soldiers saved lives on Oct 7. We read about how female IDF intelligence soldiers were ignored when they warned of Hamas Oct 7 invasion preparations. This video tells of an all-female unit that helped defend beleaguered Israeli communities on that fateful day.
https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-female-soldiers-play-crucial-role-in-hamas-conflict/
 
IDF father and daughter reunite in Gaza. Another emotional family reunion on the battlefield.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-father-and-daughter-reunite-on-gaza-battlefield/
 
Rebuilding the South & North. A historic agreement between the two largest Zionist organizations KKL-JNF and Jewish National Fund-USA has established a joint venture for reconstruction and renewal in Israel’s southern and northern regions. Each organization will contribute $25 million for each rebuilding project.
https://www.jns.org/wire/keren-kayemeth-leisrael-jewish-national-fund-and-jewish-national-fund-usa-lead-rebuilding-efforts-in-israel/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Can we talk? Researchers at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center have created LIV – a new generative AI-based platform offering personalized patient interactions and effective diagnostics to people with PTSD, depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. It reduces bottlenecks from an acute shortage of mental health experts.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/edglfl4h6
https://sheba-global.com/transforming-mental-health-care-with-ai-liv-the-next-step-in-psychiatric-innovation/
 
Pain relief is also anti-inflammatory. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s PainReform (see here previously) has developed new improved anti-inflammatory properties for its PRF-110 pain relief treatment. These have then been successfully tested in a Phase 3 multi-site US trial of 443 patients undergoing bunionectomy surgery.
https://painreform.com/releases/painreform-announces-positive-safety-profile-for-prf-110-in-phase-3-bunionectomy-study/  https://painreform.com/releases/painreform-announces-development-and-successful-manufacturing-of-new-formulations-providing-anti-inflammatory-and-extended-analgesic-effects/
 
Hope for hypothyroidism sufferers. Israeli researchers have discovered that a common pollutant (perchlorate salts – found in pesticides and automobiles) interferes with the proper functioning of the thyroid gland, leading to hypothyroidism. They built a detection device that uses a receptor molecule to alert to pollutant’s presence.
https://ats.org/ats-news/new-sensor-detects-chemicals-that-impair-thyroid-gland/
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-sensor-chemicals-impair-thyroid-gland.html
https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/chem.202302968
 
Positive thoughts can heal the heart.  At least it can in heart-diseased mice.  Scientists at Israel’s Technion Institute induced positive emotion and motivation, resulting in an immune response that helped heal cardiac scarring, increased blood vessel formation, and improved cardiac performance. So pass on my positive news!
https://technionuk.org/news-post/can-good-thoughts-heal-the-heart/
 
Predicting and preventing brain diseases. Researchers at Israel’s Technion Institute have developed a model to predict problems involving proteins that can lead to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other brain diseases. This model could serve as a basis for designing new proteins that can treat these diseases.
https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2024/08/new-hope-for-alzheimers-and-parkinsons-patients/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46881-w
 
Shape-shifting pill gets US approval. Israel’s Epitomee (see here previously) has received US-FDA  marketing approval for its pill that expands in the stomach, making it feel full and discourage overeating.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/qmnwnpw1b
 
Life-saving deliveries. (TY Hazel) Israel’s Magen David Adom is training some 1,000 Wolt delivery drivers in CPR, treating injuries, how to stop bleeding, etc., and giving them life-saving first aid tools. Wolt drivers often encounter emergencies all over Israel, in which first aid training could be vital.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-820579
 
Even smarter. (TY Hazel) Israel’s Sheba Medical Center was ranked 10th in Newsweek’s latest list of the world’s smartest hospitals, having risen from 13th (see here previously). Sheba’s standout categories were Robotics and Telemedicine.
https://www.jewishpress.com/news/health-and-medicine/sheba-medical-center-ranked-10th-smartest-hospital-worldwide/2024/09/18/  https://www.newsweek.com/rankings/worlds-best-smart-hospitals-2025
 

https://www.jns.org/israeli-mother-exposes-arab-incitement-criminality-authorities-miss/

Ayelet Lash foresaw disaster even before Oct. 7. A mother of five whose day job is teaching high school students with special needs, she moonlights as an online activist.

She’s demonstrated a knack for the role, earning several appearances on Israeli media and unwanted attention from the Israeli police.

In the last four years, police have interrogated Lash three times at the behest of the State Attorney’s Office.

She thinks the investigations were fishing expeditions in the hope of charging her with racism and incitement. Lash says the police went through countless posts of hers and challenged her on absurd items. One was a photoshopped picture of a rabbit wearing a keffiyeh. She says the fact that all the investigations were dropped shows that they could turn up nothing.

She is currently under investigation by Israel’s Civil Service Commission.

Post-Oct. 7, she started looking at the social media of her Arab neighbors in Judea and Samaria where she lives. She uncovered a cesspool of terrorist and criminal activity carried on under the noses of Israeli security forces.

Lash uncovered thieving, incitement and terrorist training with relative ease, raising the question: Where are the Israeli army, police and intelligence services?

Lash recently spoke with JNS.

Q: Do you believe there will be another Oct. 7 attack, only this time from Judea and Samaria?

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/09/more-on-operation-grim-beeper.php

Major hat tip to Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute for coming up with “Operation Grim Beeper” for Hezbollah’s exploding devices, while pointing out that this is a modern version of a very old story:

This is one of the most astonishing intelligence operations in history. It is a reworking of the story of the Trojan Horse for the digital age, and it deserves to become nearly as legendary as its iconic predecessor.

It’s going to be a while—maybe years, if ever—before we learn the complete story. The Telegraph offers some thoughts on how it went down that may turn out to be correct, and this part in particular stands out:

“Everything starts with identifying an opportunity,” says one former officer in Unit 81, the secret Israeli weapons division.

“Here, that was Hezbollah’s request to purchase pagers because they wanted to avoid using cellular mobiles because they can all be hacked and traced. But the pager is a device that we can easily control – basically you know how to get into the network and transmit whatever you want to transmit. So when we saw the order for the pagers, they said: ‘OK, we now have an opportunity to put something that we want inside those pagers.’

“Operation-wise you need to think about how to control the whole process. And we know that those pagers came out of a factory in Hungary, but it might be that those pagers left the factory in their original condition. But then maybe the customs diverted it, a delay for a couple of days because of customs issues, and then the [operations team] took care of [inserting the boobytrapped devices]. It might be that the European company is an innocent company. . .

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20947/hamas-confident-in-winning

O]ne of the key fronts in this war is not in the Middle East. It’s in the United States.

[T]he political battle over the war in Gaza has been going pretty much the way the terrorists wanted it to. That’s reflected in Mashaal’s confidence, as well as Hamas’s negotiating tactics and its strategy in Gaza. After Oct. 7, the terrorists have been doing nothing but playing for time. And they expected that the time they needed to outlast the Israeli offensive would be provided to them by Israel’s closest ally.

President Joe Biden’s initial response to the Oct. 7 massacre was to join Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in saying that the only proper response to this atrocious crime was for Hamas to be “eliminated.” But almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth, Biden began to slowly back away from that position.

Over the next several months, as Israel’s counter-offensive into Gaza began, the United States played a double game. On the one hand, Washington continued to supply Jerusalem with munitions badly needed by the IDF. Eventually, however, it was reported that the Pentagon slow-walked its delivery to maintain leverage over the Israelis.

While the public pressure on Israel was bad, even worse was the duress the administration was employing against Netanyahu behind the scenes as it sought to delay every Israeli effort at finishing off the terrorists.

Administration officials were soon parroting the defeatist line about Hamas being an “idea” that could not be defeated, rather than a terrorist force that could be eliminated. Plenty of “ideas” have been militarily defeated, such as Nazism, which didn’t survive the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s genocidal regime. But to Americans and Israeli liberals, Hamas is regarded as an eternal force. By adopting this position, the opportunity to convince Palestinians to give up their fantasies about Israel’s elimination was thrown away and their century-long war on Zionism prolonged.

As Mashaal told the Times, Hamas viewed all of this as encouragement for its plan to simply… hold out until U.S. and international pressure — heightened by the anti-Israel bias of the mainstream media — forced Israel to stand down and allow the Islamists to emerge as the victor in the war.

The families of the remaining hostages and Netanyahu’s political opposition now seek to pressure him to give up the war and sign a ceasefire agreement, even if it means essentially handing Gaza back to Hamas and ensuring a repeat of the horrors of Oct. 7…. Hamas is counting on that sentiment.

But above all, Hamas views American pressure on Israel as its ace in the hole. As Mashaal pointed out, the way that the hostage negotiations have been handled by Washington has amounted to American “recognition” of Hamas as a diplomatic partner as opposed to a despised and outlawed terrorist organization. He is right about that.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/18/this-wasnt-a-war-crime-it-was-an-audacious-assault-on-anti-semites/

Getting your balls blown off by a primed pager has got to be the most ‘f**k around, find out’ thing that has ever happened. It took place in Lebanon yesterday. To the approval of both supporters of Israel and meme-makers everywhere, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives suddenly exploded. The footage coming out of Lebanon is extraordinary. A man’s trouser pocket erupting in a supermarket, a man writhing in agony in the middle of the road after his trusted comms device turned on him. The battle of the pagers will surely be recorded as one of the most unusual and audacious acts in the entire history of human warfare.

All eyes are on Israel, naturally. Experts suspect Mossad intercepted a massive stash of pagers destined for Hezbollah militants and planted explosive material in the batteries. Then they sent a signal, from hundreds of miles away, that caused the batteries to overheat and eventually to blow up. The planning required for such a spectacular op blows the mind – no pun intended. I know Israelophobia is the default position of the influential classes, but surely even they will admit this was an ingenious way for the Jewish State to take out the adherents to a self-styled ‘army of god’ that has sworn itself to excising the ‘cancerous growth’ of Zionism from the Middle East. (They mean Jews.)

Much remains unclear about the operation. Israel has not claimed responsibility. It is reported that 12 people were killed. Tragically, two of them were children. The others included Hezbollah fighters. Around 3,000 were injured, including Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani. Of course, the West’s leftists are too busy slamming evil Israel to ask why an Iranian official was in such close proximity to a Hezbollah pager. But then, we all know why. Yet for all the questions that still hang over this techno-assault on medieval militants, some observers seem unshakeably certain about one thing: it was terrorism. It was a war crime. It was yet more proof of what a uniquely nasty nation Israel is.

Invective is flying and tears are flowing across social media. The demonic state strikes again, radicals wail.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/israels-critics-will-only-be-satisfied-if-it-loses/

Once again, the nation is held to impossible standards of moral perfection, even when launching a daring preemptive strike that ultimately saves civilian lives in the long run.

In June of this year, when Israel rescued four hostages alive and unharmed from Hamas captivity, I well recall the perversity of the mainstream-media coverage of the event. Instead of celebrating the audacity and bravery of an impossibly complicated mission that freed innocent civilians from the clutches of murderous terrorists, the media narrative instead became about the “collateral damage” the bloodthirsty Israelis had caused.

Fake casualty numbers were immediately announced by Hamas, to be instantly and unquestioningly spread by journalists whose credulity verged on complicity. Israel was castigated for such things as the cruel and senseless murder of Palestine Chronicle journalist Abdallah Aljamal, who happened to be holding three of the Israeli hostages in his own home when the IDF found him. It was then that I concluded that the game was rigged, and that in terms of narrative framing, Israel would forever only be able to do wrong in the eyes of the media. And I am reminded of that sobering conclusion by the emergent reaction to Israel’s latest intelligence coup, which — though more muted — tracks closely along those same lines, with the same complaints levied by precisely the same suspects.

To catch up all those folks who have been out of the loop and away from their communications devices over the past day and a half, let me start by saying: If yours didn’t explode, then congratulations! You are likely not a member of Hezbollah! Because pretty much all of theirs just did: Yesterday, the encrypted pagers of Hezbollah personnel across Lebanon simultaneously exploded, and just a few hours ago, their entire supply of walkie-talkies went up in an even larger series of remote detonations. Several people died outright, and many others have been brutally maimed in an area particularly sensitive to the pride of military-aged jihadists. These explosions were remotely triggered by Israel, of course, which has been fighting an all but declared war with Iran against its proxies Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, on Israel’s northern border, ever since the October 7 massacre.

https://nypost.com/2024/09/18/opinion/israel-turns-the-pager-on-terror-with-ruthless-psychological-masterstroke-against-hezbollah/

Nobody likes to see humans writhing in agony, but Israel’s daring operation to simultaneously explode pagers in the pockets of Hezbollah terrorists and their associates this week was a ruthless tactical masterstroke. 

In bloody scenes captured on video on social media, men could be seen shopping or sitting on a motorbike one minute and on the ground moaning and covered in blood the next.

At least 12 people were killed and nearly 3,000 people were injured in Lebanon Tuesday, and a similar detonation of Hezbollah walkie-talkies the next day killed another 20 people and injured 450. 

In Hezbollah’s macho culture, the psychological blow of their warriors and officials getting their genitalia blown up is acute, and so is the signal sent to Iran, that no communications devices are safe after Israel managed to kill Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh under the noses of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran by tracking his whereabouts via his cellphone.

Hence the terrorists’ migration to more primitive devices like pagers.  The ingenious “Paging Hezbollah” operation was about as surgical a strike on terrorists as you could get, although Lebanese authorities claimed two innocent children were killed in Tuesday’s attack, more tragic victims of a pointless war that Hamas started on Oct. 7 last year.

Dem sympathizers 

Of course, the Hamas sympathizers in the Democratic Party like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez immediately condemned Israel with a passion that seems to evade them when Israeli civilians are raped and murdered.

There are no circumstances in which Israel is allowed to defend itself.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/israeli-intelligence-is-amazing/

Despite much saber-rattling, Iran has not yet retaliated (as it has promised) for the breathtaking operation that neutralized Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh with a bomb planted in a diplomatic safe house in Tehran. Iran’s reluctance may be at least partly inspired by the regime’s well-founded belief that acting in haste might lead to an explosive device going off uncomfortably close to one’s nether regions.

That is what happened this morning to over 1,000 Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria. “Pagers carried by hundreds of Hezbollah operatives unexpectedly exploded at about the same time Tuesday afternoon,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days,” the dispatch continued. “A Hezbollah official said hundreds of fighters had such devices, speculating that malware may have caused the devices to explode.”

Ironically enough, Hezbollah reportedly came to rely on pagers rather than more modern communications technologies because they were thought to be safe from “Israel’s electronic eavesdropping,” which is “regarded as among the world’s most sophisticated.” Hezbollah adapted, but so, too, did the Israelis.

There is, as yet, zero confirmation of Israeli involvement in what one Hezbollah official deemed the “biggest security breach” the terror group has experienced since the October 7 massacre. But there have been a lot of security breaches of late.

In July, Israel claimed credit for the successful targeting of one top Hezbollah operative, Fuad Shukr, in a Beirut suburb. Deemed the “right-hand man” to the terror group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Shukr was also one of the primary perpetrators of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in which 241 U.S. service personnel were killed. According to the Journal’s reporting, Shukr received a phone call, likely from a figure in Hezbollah’s orbit turned by Israeli intelligence or directly tied to Israeli security services, instructing him to head to the seventh floor of the building he occupied, where he was taken out in a pinprick strike.