Shortly before the start of Tuesday night’s round that ended in Israeli Judoka Yarden Gerbi’s victory in the Rio Olympic Games, Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev (Likud) who is present at the games, sent an SMS to “the kabbalist from Netivot,” Rabbi Netanel Shriki, a.k.a. “the tunnel collapser,” asking for his help.
One of the people close to the mystic disseminated a screenshot of his cell phone with the message from Regev: “Dear Rabbi, how are you? We here hope and pray that we’ll get a bronze medal. Yarden Gerbi’s bout is in halaf an hour, we deserve to get a medal and hear the national anthem.”
Rabbi Shriki’s followers believe that he has been bringing down the Hamas tunnels with the power of his prayers. During the two-month period last spring, when about ten Hamas tunnels collapsed, some burying Hamas terrorists under the rubble, the students of Rabbi Shriki from Netivot, near the Gaza border, were certain their rabbi was the cause. In early 2016, he began praying at the border fence, exposed to sniper fire from the other side, asking God to help Israel. His students have no doubt that his prayers were being answered (On Tuesday this week, just before Gerbi earned her bronze medal, yet another tunnel collapsed, burying alive the Islamic Jihad terrorists inside).
The students told website Haredi 10 they saw the rabbi go out to the fields to pray for the tunnels to collapse, and each time, a tunnel collapse was reported shortly thereafter.
“This is already not a case of a string of circumstantial events,” the students insisted. “Five times in a row he went out to pray for the tunnels to collapse, and each time it happened.”