1. ISRAELI ARABS ARRESTED IN PLOT TO KILL POLITICAL PARTY’S RABBI-MENTOR… Three Arab men who are residents of Jerusalem have been arrested and charged with planning to kill ‘Ovadia Yosef, the rabbinical mentor of Israel’s Shas party. The suspects are members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. One of the trio holds an Israeli identification card and French citizenship. According to security sources, the suspects were arrested after being seen scouting out Yosef’s home and after having purchased weapons. The sources claim that the terror cell began by passing out leaflets and painting graffiti, but were recruited by the PFLP. They reportedly had contact with PFLP members in jail in connection with the murder of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehav’am Zeevi in 2001. The idea of killing Yosef came from one of the three who knew the Shas leader’s home from his work delivering groceries for a store in a Jerusalem neighborhood near Yosef’s home.
2. NEW ENVOY WOLFENSOHN TO VISIT REGION NEXT WEEK… James Wolfensohn, newly appointed as the Quartet’s Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement, said on Sunday that he will visit the region as early as next week. The World Bank, from which Wolfensohn is stepping down as president, has given its permission for him to begin his new role before his term expires at the end of May. Wolfensohn’s duties will include coordinating economic and social issues in the Palestinian Authority in the aftermath of Israel’s planned unilateral withdrawal. He has said that his baseline for approaching the issues is December’s World Bank report that called on Israel to ease passage of goods and people and called on the Palestinian Authority to enact security reforms.
3. ISRAELI GOVERNMENT BEGINS DEALING WITH ISSUE OF TEMPORARY HOUSING FOR GAZA EVACUEES… The Israeli cabinet decided on Sunday to allocate $4.5 million to build 150 temporary housing units for Israelis slated to be evacuated from their homes in the Gaza Strip this summer. The units will be constructed in rural areas on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza. Less than three months until the pullout remains if the government sticks to the July 20th start date, yet virtually no plans for relocating approximately 8,500 Gaza residents have been made. The possibility of a slight delay of the withdrawal until mid-August was raised on Sunday, but it is not believed that it will provide sufficient time to significantly affect the housing issue.
4. INDONESIAN MUSLIMS FLOCK TO THE STREET IN PROTEST OF THE DEMONSTRATION THAT WASN’T… An estimated 100,000 Indonesian Muslims took to the streets of Jakarta on Sunday protesting what was termed the Israeli threat to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. In an ironic twist, however, the event that triggered the Islamic protest never happened. Although right wing Jewish organizations tried encouraging 10,000 Jews to ascend the Temple Mount en masse, Israeli police prevented any assemblage from forming. According to The Media Line Bureau Chief David Harris who was an eyewitness to the planned demonstration, barely fifty people were seen in any given place at one time, the total number of demonstrators outnumbered by media.