יום חמישי, ל׳ אב תשפ״וThursday, August 13, 2026
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Frimet and Arnold Roth began writing and speaking publicly soon after the murder of their fifteen year-old daughter Malki Z"L in the Jerusalem Sbarro massacre, August 9, 2001 (Chaf Av, 5761). They have both been, and are, frequently interviewed for radio, television and the print media, including CNN, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Al-Jazeera, and others. Their blog This Ongoing War deals with the under-appreciated price of living in a society afflicted by terrorism which, they contend, means the entire world. Frimet is a native of Queens, NY while her husband was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. They brought their family to settle in Jerusalem in 1988. They co-founded the Malki Foundation in 2001 and are deeply involved in its work as volunteers. They can be reached at thisoingoingwar@gmail.com .
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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized Europe for failing to combat terrorists. Of course we wasn't referring to Hezbollah.
David Cameron's response to infamous British MP George Galloway in parliament last week.
According to israeli Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Amnon Sofri, the transfer of unconventional weapons to Hezbollah is a red line for Israel when it comes to Syria.
Analysis released by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research contains a wealth of insights which have been ignored by the media.
The Palestinians and their advocates rationalize the use of children in jihad.
How good are the chances for a better understanding on both sides of the dispute when the presence of one word on a printed label triggers the involvement of the military, the police and the judiciary?
The facts tend to be less urgent for individuals with an ideological predisposition to kicking out at Israel at every opportunity.
Here in Israel, keeping your head in the sand is seen as an unbearably expensive option.
Human Rights Watch attacked Israel for bombing a media installation. Perhaps they have forgotten the story of Palestinian journalist Ahlam Tamimi.
France says that the UN Disengagement Observer Force may removed due to the fear of Syrian chemical weapons.
If this were happening in your neighborhood, what steps would you be taking?
The Malki Foundation's goal is to make home-care a real option for families of disabled children.
The chances that Gazan mortars and rockets are being withdrawn from service? Not so great.
A contemporary variant of Kafka's "The Trial" is unfolding in Dubai.
Denmark, Finland, Portugal and Ireland opposed any condemnation whatsoever by the EU of Mashaal's calls for Israel's annihilation and destruction.
There is abundant and growing cause to deeply regret the extorted decision that led to October 2011's mass release of unrepentant killers and other terrorists from Israeli prisons.
Those of us living just south of the Syrians intuitively understand how much more serious the consequences can be for us.
Looking ahead, there's more than a little reason to take a sober view of the future.
What's happened the ceasefire went into effect.
While Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal was on CNN, his Gaza-based Hamas colleagues were talking - in the Arabic language - about continuing the fight against Israel until the "liberation of all our lands, from the sea to the river."
The complicity of the media in Arab aggression against Israel.
The IDF says no fewer than 99 such explosive devices have 'fallen short' in the last four days.
The reality of what is happening is much less poetic, but astonishing when you pause to think about it.
From personal messages received from family and friends, and from scanning the online sources - here are the rocket attacks, just in one hour this morning.
As massive as the fighting is, the count of dead on the Palestinian Arab side has three, perhaps two, civilians. Let's hope the effectiveness of the Israeli fighters continues at that exemplary level.
In a small effort to correct that distortion, here is a status report from the Gaza NGO Safety Office.
For hundreds of thousands of Israelis living in the south, yesterday was tumultuous in the worst way. Unstemmed rocket attacks have been conducted by one or another of the terrorist groups based in Hamas-controlled Gaza at all hours of the day and night. While it's tempting to look at the absence of deaths on the Israeli side, the reality is any one of these rockets and mortars can easily have exacted the heaviest of prices. It's our great fortune that this did not happen today.
This picture has criss-crossed the blogosphere and Twitter network like crazy last night. It pretends to be an image of children who, along with the man lying on a stretcher next to them, were allegedly targeted today by Israel's forces for being terrorists. In reality, the picture is four years old. It has nothing to do with anything that happened in Gaza last night.
Since we believe Palestinian Arab casualties that result from Palestinian Arab mis-handling or misfiring of Palestinian Arab explosives, guns, rockets, mortars and the like almost never get reported in the mainstream news media, we will be watching to see how much coverage this incident below gets. It appears at this moment on a Bethlehem-based (and somewhat Hamas-hostile) Palestinian news site.
Not that anyone is paying attention, but this morning a rocket was fired on the Eshkol Region, yet another rocket attack from Gaza.
Recently, we wrote here about the great landmass on Israel's southwestern border that "given its physical proximity to Israel, Sinai is not only an Egyptian challenge. That it gets such a small degree of media attention is a puzzle." Since then, there has been a new set of Sinai developments to absorb
Those of us who live in countries where freedom of opinion, of worship, of political viewpoint and the right to express ourselves as we wish are core values tend to lose sight of life is like where those values don't exist. In the towns ruled by the Palestinian Authority, for instance.
Lingering doubts that remained about the criminality of the organization frequently called the United States' "largest Islamic charity" [NY Times] ended on Monday. That's when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that it would not overturn an earlier appeal that went against five officials from Holy Land Foundation convicted of illegally funneling millions of dollars to Hamas. That appears to be the final legal avenue open to the convicted men and concludes the case.
A striking photo essay from EgyptSource focuses on the stark realities of Sinai and the multiple challenges it poses to the Egyptians. EgyptSource, a project of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East "follows Egypt’s transition and provides a platform for Egyptian perspectives on the major issues – economic, political, legal, religious and human rights – that are at stake in the post-Mubarak era..."
It's just after ten in the morning here on a bright, warm Autumn morning. A delightful, breezy day. Unless you are very determined, and even if you feel very connected to events, it's near impossible to get a meaningful sense of the sheer terror of living within range of the rocket men of Gaza. The thugs of the Hamas-dominated enclave are armed to the teeth with a rocket arsenal that numbers in the tens of thousands... and growing.
Hezbollah, by most calculations, is the military force that has the largest deployment of weapons pointed at Israel today. It's Iran's proxy, and is funded and armed by Iran and also by Syria. In much of the Arab and Moslem world, it has long been called a resistance movement [see this Asia Times analysis from 2006]. Among Western countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada and of course Israel, it's been classified as a terrorist organization for years and remains so.
It's a news story that directly affects just one man, but the implications of what is being done to Prof. Cyril Karabus are horrific, and of particular note to air travelers planning to fly Qantas at some future time. Recently, Karabus has been released on bail, but cannot leave the UAE as his passport has been confiscated.
One of the world's respected associations of lawyers has just made a special award in honor of one of its deceased members. Her career was not long. But it was not the quality of her legal work that earned her the award. She received it for killing 21 civilians and injuring 50 in a Haifa restaurant. The award about which we are writing was presented in the form of a plaque to the family of Hanadi Jaradat, formerly from Jenin in the Palestinian Authority territory, "on the sweet anniversary of her martyrdom."
Tomorrow, Thursday, October 18, marks one year since the Shalit deal when Israel received back the kidnapped hostage soldier, Gilad Shalit, and freed more than a thousand convicted terrorists, many of them killers of Israeli civilians. Yediot Aharonot carried a report today that is translated to English and excerpted below. It reveals some aspects of the transaction that, as far as we can tell, have gotten little to no coverage in other parts of the Israeli media.
The United Arab Emirates huge airline, Emirates, has just done a deal with Qantas to essentially take over the Australian airline's steering wheel. With the Australian government blessing the deal a few days ago, it looks like full steam ahead. And according to a recent UAE business news website, the Flying Kangaroo is already thoroughly and irretrievably locked in. So it appears Australians headed for Europe on the nation's flag-carrier will be traveling through the Dubai airport henceforth, instead of via gorgeous Singapore and its magnificent Changi Airport. The reasons are all about business, money and saving Qantas.
There was not that much doubt, when reports of Israel bringing down an unidentified drone over the southern Hebron Hills first appeared a week ago, that the spy plane originated with Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah.
Today marks ten years since jihadist terrorists carried out a ghastly bombing attack on night club spots on the Indonesian island of Bali. The Kuta Beach massacre was the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of Indonesia: 202 people were killed that night. 164 were foreign nationals, 38 were Indonesian citizens. 209 people were injured. Almost immediately after it happened on 12th October 2002, the then editorial team at the Melbourne (Australia) Herald-Sun newspaper contacted Arnold Roth.
Ignore for the moment the rank racism, the poor spelling, the absence of any basis for the wild and irresponsible allegations...
Sometimes the global efforts of the Islamists pay dividends for them. Sometimes they are frustrated by the authorities. Nothing happens very quickly in the battle against them. And no one can seriously claim they are being defeated; on the contrary. Some snapshots from the last 24 hours.
Questions abound as the IDF released scant information about the drone which entered Israeli airspace. News agencies add additional minor details but the large questions remain unanswered for the moment. China's Xinhua news service says the unidentified drone flew over settlements and military bases in southern Israel briefly before being brought down by IDF fire over an open unpopulated area. It was spotted entering Israel's airspace from the Mediterranean sea heading from the west to the east. But there is no word on where the UAV originated.
This same Mr Erdogan, who reserves to himself the right to defend his citizens and his borders and warns malefactors that they should not even dream of testing his country's determination, has expressed himself quite differently when it was Israel that took defensive measures in the face of lethal terrorist behavior that goes on and on.
Human Rights Watch released a report on Hamas abuses of Palestinian human rights in the criminal justice system, including arbitrary arrests, failure to inform relatives of the whereabouts of detainees, the arrest, abuse and torture of lawyers, using military courts to try civilians, and death sentences.
If you saw our posting [here] about the thoughtful Israeli television series that takes a remarkably close look at Europe's Muslims, you may be interested to know that the fourth episode of the four-part series went to air this week on Israel's Channel 2, and is posted in full on the web
In the past hour, mortar fire erupted on Israel's northern border, causing explosions in what appear, for now, to be open fields. No injuries, but some property damage that's not yet detailed in the news here. It's reported that the fire is a kind of spillover from the barbarism unfolding over the past year inside Syria: the source is believed to be forces of the Syrian army "engaged" - as the journalists like to put it - with rebel forces near Syria's border with Israel.
Allah Islam, an extraordinary four-part television series currently unfolding on Israel's Channel 10 deals in a unique and extremely effective way with the mutual interaction of European society and Islamic immigrants.
The mainstream Australian media are reporting with astonishment on the sight of elementary school children being pushed front and center by radical adults to embody the lust for Islamist jihad and to advocate the killing of unbelievers.
Thinking that he had loaded a car bomb into the Jeep Cherokee that he was driving, he parked it outside a bar in downtown Chicago and walked away into an alley after doing everything he thought necessary for it to detonate. Safely distant, he then pressed the trigger mechanism in the presence of the agent, intending an explosion and deaths to follow. He was then arrested. Unknown to him, the bomb was inert and was designed not to explode. A preliminary hearing is set for Monday at a U.S. courthouse in Chicago.
Hezbollah now has 60-70,000 rockets, according to Maj.-Gen. (ret) Amos Gilad, a former IDF Spokesperson and Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, who delivered a major speech last week at the World Summit of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, which ended yesterday. "The next war will be aimed against the home front," he said. But Iran, which backs and has been arming Hezbollah may be a greater threat. In a paper from May 2012, Gilad said however that the "the main issue today is how to prevent a nuclear Iran."
In the past seven years since the Disengagement from Gaza, we have been witness to the conversion of Gush Katif into an armed camp, an arsenal from which some 9,400 rockets and missiles have been fired at the Israeli civilians and communities on the other side of the fence.
Despite President Obama's assertions at the 9-11 memorial that the fight against terror is only against al Qaeda, it was still good to hear him speaking about the enduring nature of a nation’s memory of its terror victims. Here in Israel, we (the bloggers behind This Ongoing War) waged a campaign for years to require the Jerusalem municipality to remember Jerusalem’s victims of terror.
In tough economic times, you make tough economic decisions. Unless you're the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians receive the highest levels of aid per capita, use it to fund terrorists in prison and at the same time rack up high debts, such as their NIS 700 million debt to the Israel Electric Company. The bulk of the aid comes from the U.S. and Europe.
From far away, it may seem surprising that Israelis still continue to seek normal relations with the Arabs with whom we share so many aspects of life. Anyone in doubt about this needs simply to walk into any Israeli hospital.
According to the Egyptian newspaper, Al-Masry Al-Youm, due to negotiations between Egypt and jihadists groups, "Operation Eagle" has been halted, at least temporarily.
We have searched and have not yet found a blog, article, published speech or op-ed in her language, Arabic, which criticizes proud terrorist Ahlam Tamimi or her views. So far, not one. If our readers can point us to exceptions, please do. This is deeply shocking. Tamimi's message resonates throughout the Arab and Islamic world. Her views don't even rise to the level of controversial. She's simply a hero, wall to wall.
Watch how this woman's face radiates the joy that comes from recounting how the death toll grew steadily in the hour or so that she spent fleeing the scene via public transport, unhindered by the police.
Terrorists inside cars, frequently young men with explosives stuffed into their clothing, are a fixture in streets controlled by Hamas and other like-minded terrorist groups. There's an understandable reticence on the part of the Palestinian Arab terror organizations to own up to the way they place their own communities and neighbours at mortal risk, using them in effect as human shields.
How can people understand the defensive measures Israel's military takes if basic information about ongoing constant terrorist attacks goes unreported in the news media?
“If you believe that the 11 murdered athletes must be mentioned, stand for a spontaneous minute when the IOC president begins to speak,” said Ilana Romano, wife of Yossef Romano, a weightlifter who was murdered in the 1972 attack.
When it comes to carrying out deadly terrorist attacks on Israelis and/or Jews, just how dangerous and persistent is the government of Iran?
How often do Gaza's Palestinian Arab terrorists end up hitting their parents, children, spouses or neighbors? Do you see these self-inflicted losses reported in the news media that serve your community? Keep the question in mind the next time you hear of injuries or deaths in Gaza along with Israeli denials of involvement.
August 14, 2026 
