News stories by Pierre Klochendler, page 7

'There is the beginning of my life. My father would call for prayer, ‘Allahu Akbar’,' says 72-year old Yacoub Odeh, pointing to a collapsed house perched high on the hill. 'The whole village would hear him.' Odeh was then eight years old: 'I’m the son of yesterday.'

If on Sep. 4, exit polls confirm what opinion polls currently predict — the reinstatement of a right-wing government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu — Israelis might still ask themselves, what was this general election about?

'Black flag — do not enter the water!' announces the lifeguard. The waves might not lap indolently at the beach; the beach might not yet be replete with laidback beachgoers. But it already vibrates to the frenzy beat of ‘sun and fun’. For Israel’s navy and marine police though, the just-opened beach season doesn’t exhale a sweet breeze of nonchalance.

That 'Welcome to Palestine' isn’t ‘Welcomed to Israel’ couldn’t be clearer. Wishing to land in Israel and to protest the 45-year occupation of Palestine in Bethlehem, most ‘Fly-tilla’ activists were treated by Israel’s authorities as a 'strategic menace', questioned, interned and deported.

A lyrical attack by Germany’s acclaimed novelist and essayist Günter Grass in which he labelled Israel’s alleged atomic arsenal and looming pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear installations a threat to world peace has triggered fury and controversy amongst Israelis.

In a first in years, snow blessed the Holy City last month. For a moment, hail metamorphosed into a paltry three-millimetre layer of white, liquid, light. Children and parents and snowmen relished the wonders of an almost real, though usually ephemeral, winter. But then, the Ice Age befell Jerusalem...

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) held its conference this month in Israel for the first time. Do future wars by land, sea and air belong to robots?

There’s a story behind each of the 1,100 photos. Each photo is worth a thousand words and memories. Seventy-four-year-old Bracha Aris is a Holocaust survivor. She’s always kept her lips sealed about the past — until recently...

'The quiet before the storm' is how Israeli pundits describe the countdown — not to Israel going solo on Iran’s nuclear and military installations, but to the meeting between due Monday next week between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

On the day Israel released some 550 Palestinian prisoners in the second half of a swap for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who had been held for five-and-a-half years by Hamas in Gaza, an Islamic Jihad activist started an agonising hunger strike.