The Times of Israel is liveblogging Wednesday’s events as they happen.
Houthis say they will resume attacks on Israeli ships in light of Gaza aid cut-off
Yemen’s Houthis say they will attack any Israeli ship that violates the group’s ban on Israeli ships passing through the Red and Arabian seas, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden, effective immediately.
The leader of Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis said on Friday that the group would resume its naval operations against Israel if Israel did not lift a renewed blockage of aid into Gaza within four days.
Freed hostage Omer Wenkert says he always knew when truce talks failed because captors would take it out on him
Released hostage Omer Wenkert tells Channel 12 that although he was cut off from the outside world throughout his 505 days in captivity in Gaza, he always knew when talks for a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas had fallen through or when a senior Hamas operative was killed, because his terrorist captors would take it out on him.
“Every deal that fell through would bring up a lot of frustration, rage and anger,” Wenkert says of his captors. “Not to mention when one of their fathers was killed, or their families, or when their senior officials were assassinated. You feel it. You know exactly what happened.”
He says that in those instances, his captors would beat him, spit on him, and force him to do strenuous physical exercise.
“I was very weak physically,” he says, adding that his captors’ goal was “humiliation.”
During his interview with Channel 12, Wenkert gives a blow-by-blow account of his time in captivity, starting with the night of October 7, 2023, when he drove down to the Nova music festival with his best friend Kim Damti.
Damti was killed in the same bomb shelter Wenkert was taken from, although he didn’t discover her fate until his return to Israel.
Opposition files unprecedented 71,023 objections to controversial judicial overhaul law
Opposition parties file an unprecedented 71,023 objections to the government’s highly controversial judicial overhaul law in the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee against a bill that would change the composition of the Judicial Selection Committee and how it appoints judges.
The number of objections corresponds to the date of Hamas’s October 7 invasion and atrocities in 2023, which the opposition MKs filing them say is designed to “underline the absurdity of advancing a controversial law at a time of war” and when “hostages are still being held captive by Hamas.”
The number of objections is unprecedented in the history of the Knesset, and is designed to serve as a type of filibuster to stall the progress of the bill which, once approved in committee, requires only its final back-to-back second and third readings in the Knesset plenum.
The gambit will however likely be parried by Constitution Committee Chairman MK Simcha Rothman through a parliamentary tool to bundle batches of objections together to overcome such tactics.
Voting on the objections will begin tomorrow morning, and it seems likely therefore that the committee will only be able to approve the substance of the bill next week.
A source close to Justice Minister Yariv Levin says the bill may be brought to its final votes in the Knesset plenum next week, although if the committee only votes on the clauses of the bill next week, bringing it to the plenum the same week would be unlikely.
The opposition, as well as the attorney general and three former Supreme Court presidents, have strongly criticized the bill, saying it would politicize the judicial selection process and therefore undermine the independence of the judiciary.
Democrats MK and Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee member Gilad Kariv describes the bill as “the very heart of the regime coup,” in reference to the government’s judicial overhaul agenda.
“This is an extreme and unbalanced bill that poses a real and present threat to the independence of the courts and gives the justice minister dramatic control over the selection of judges,” says Kariv.
Rothman, Levin and other proponents of the bill argue that the judiciary has too much control over judicial appointments and that giving politicians greater control would redress what they claim is an imbalanced reality in which the government has difficulty appointing judges it favors.