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On Saturday night in Ashkelon, locals were evacuated from their homes in fear – for the first time since the end of Operation Protective Edge in late August. The reason wasn’t a long-range rocket fired from Gaza, but an improvised explosive device found inside a city apartment building. The bomb was left outside the house of the daughter of Eli Elezra, a powerful local businessman and contractor. No stranger to threats and extortion attempts by organized crime figures, his home was […]

“This looks bad, this looks really bad.” Those were the words that ran through my mind when I first watched the surveillance video of cops shooting 22-year-old Kheir al-Din Hamdan dead in Kafr Kana Friday. Needless to say, I wasn’t alone. It all began with a routine arrest on a weapons charge, linked to an ongoing family feud in the city. Special Patrol Unit officers who police the area, partly in order to fight firearms crimes, had arrested a friend of

(Note: This post originally appeared on Tabletmag.com) It’s easy to picture the screenplay: Bill Murray is a foreign correspondent who finds himself once again covering the rocket strikes on the southern Israel town of Sderot and the residents in the line of fire, only to awake the next morning, time after time, to live the same story again. That’s the scenario Al Jazeera English’s Gregg Carlstrom faced in real life last Thursday, prompting him to tweet: “writing a story about Sderot

(Update: Yaakov Felician was remanded on January 7th, 2014 for allegedly threatening the witness in a [closed] rape case against him. The following post originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post) Though they say it typically doesn’t happen twice in the same place, in 2013 lightning struck one small corner of Bnei Brak’s Pardes Katz neighborhood over and over, continuously bringing sorrow to a single Israeli family. Few people had a worse year in 2013 than the Felician family. In June, police announced

If you were worried, Dror Alperon will be marrying his fiancée Tuesday night, less than a week after he was arrested in connection to a double murder in Petah Tikva in June. Dror, his aunt Haya, and his cousin Reuben Partush have all been released, and by the end of the week the remaining two suspects Eli Partush and Asher Gini also stand to be set free. The police case against the suspects is a convoluted story of revenge for a