Tag Archives: Jerusalem

Israeli police resume interview of Netanyahu in corruption probe

Israeli police resume interview of Netanyahu in corruption probe

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli police officers on Sunday questioned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the sixth time in a corruption probe, a police spokeswoman said.

Investigators arrived by car in late afternoon to Netanyahu’s official residence in Jerusalem where past interrogations have taken place, and disappeared behind security gates.

Police said Netanyahu was questioned for several hours at his residence in an ongoing fraud investigation under the oversight of the state attorney, the country’s chief prosecutor, and with the authorisation of the attorney-general.

No charges have been brought against Netanyahu, who has been in power since 2009 and has denied wrongdoing.

He is a suspect in two cases, one involving the receipt of gifts from businessmen and the other related to alleged conversations he held with an Israeli newspaper publisher about limiting competition in the news sector in exchange for more positive coverage.

Police said earlier this month that a top Netanyahu confidant had been questioned as part of a different investigation into a $2 billion submarine deal with Germany.

(Reporting by Dedi Hayoun; Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Mark Potter and David Evans)

U.S. pressure delays Israel’s ‘Greater Jerusalem’ bill

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man walks on a road in the Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit in the occupied West Bank

By Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – U.S. pressure delayed an Israeli ministerial vote on Sunday on a proposed bill that Washington fears entails annexation of Jewish settlements near Jerusalem, an Israeli lawmaker said.

The “Greater Jerusalem” legislation would put some settlements in the occupied West Bank, built on land Palestinians seek for a future state and viewed as illegal by most countries, under the jurisdiction of Jerusalem’s municipality.

The bill, proposed by a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, was to have been submitted for approval on Sunday to a ministerial committee on legislation, a first step before a series of ratification votes in parliament.

But Likud lawmaker David Bitan, chairman of Netanyahu’s coalition in parliament, said a vote by the cabinet committee would be delayed because Washington told Israel the bill’s passage could impede U.S. efforts to revive peace talks that collapsed in 2014.

“There is American pressure that claims this is about annexation and that this could interfere with the peace process,” Bitan told Army Radio.

“The prime minister doesn’t think this is about annexation. I don’t think so either. We have to take the time to clarify matters to the Americans. Therefore, if the bill passes in a week, or in a month, it’s less problematic,” he said.

Proponents of the legislation say it falls short of formal land annexation to Israel but will enable some 150,000 settlers to vote in Jerusalem city elections. Intelligence Minister Israel Katz, a supporter of the bill, has said this would “ensure a Jewish majority in a united Jerusalem”.

Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem as its capital, including the eastern sector it captured along with the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a 1967 Middle East war, has not won international recognition. Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they seek to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli media reports said the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, had conveyed misgivings about the legislation, under which the large Maale Adumim and Beitar Illit settlements would become part of a Greater Jerusalem municipality.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper quoted Netanyahu as telling cabinet ministers on Sunday: “The Americans turned to us and inquired what the bill was all about. As we have been coordinating with them until now, it is worth continuing to talk and coordinate with them.”

A U.S. embassy spokeswoman declined immediate comment.

Some 500,000 Israelis live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas home to more than 2.6 million Palestinians. Israel disputes that its settlements are illegal, citing historical, Biblical and political links to the territory, as well as security considerations.

 

 

(Editing by Catherine Evans)

 

Israel approves building plans for 31 settler homes in West Bank’s Hebron

Israeli soldiers stand at a military camp in the West Bank city of Hebron October 17, 2017. REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel on Monday approved building plans for 31 settler homes in Hebron in the West Bank, a spokeswoman said, a first such move in the Israeli-occupied area for some 15 years.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has felt increased pressure for settlement expansion from the rightist flank of his coalition, though construction is not imminent as a bureaucratic process must still run its course.

His government has made numerous announcements of settlement building recently, angering Palestinians seeking a state on land Israel captured in a 1967 war but no longer eliciting serious U.S. criticism with President Donald Trump in the White House.

Still, settlement advocates say that despite a string of announcements for construction of thousands of settler homes in the West Bank, only a fraction might be built eventually.

Hebron is the largest Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank with a population of some 216,000. About 1,000 Israeli settlers live in the heart of the city, which for decades has been a focus of religious friction between Muslims and Jews.

Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now detailed the project’s plans in an area of Hebron where the settlers live and its web site showed a graphic of what the prospective four-storey, stone-clad apartment block would look like.

It said that the last time settler homes were built in this area was in 2002.

Hadar Horen, a spokeswoman for the Israeli body that runs civilian affairs in the West Bank, could not confirm the details issued by Peace Now and said the planning committee decision would be published later.

(Writing by Ori Lewis; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Hamas picks new deputy chief whom Israel blames for helping spark Gaza war

GAZA (Reuters) – The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas named as its new deputy chief on Thursday a formerly Turkey-based commander whom Israel has accused of orchestrating a lethal triple kidnapping that helped trigger the 2014 Gaza war.

Saleh al-Arouri’s promotion comes as Hamas seeks to close ranks with U.S.-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas after a decade-old schism, in an entente Israel says will not revive peace talks unless Hamas recognizes its right to exist and disarms.

The Palestinian Information Center, a Hamas-linked news site, said Arouri, who was born in the occupied West Bank and was exiled by Israel in 2010 after long stints in its prisons, had been elected as deputy to the group’s leader Ismail Haniyeh.

“He (Arouri) is now the Hamas movement’s No. 2 man,” the site said. “Twenty-three years of detention and expulsion have not weakened the resolve of the leader Saleh al-Arouri, 51.”

After three Israeli teens were abducted and killed in the West Bank in June 2014, Arouri – then in Istanbul – claimed responsibility in the name of Hamas.

Israel responded with a West Bank security sweep which, along with the revenge killing of a Palestinian youth from Jerusalem by a group of Israelis, spiraled into a 50-day war in the Gaza Strip, Hamas’ fiefdom. Gaza health officials say 2,100 Palestinians were killed in the conflict, while Israel put the number of its dead at 67 soldiers and six civilians.

Israel also pressed Ankara’s Islamist-rooted government to crack down on Arouri, describing him as the mastermind of the kidnappings and other Hamas militant attacks.

Hamas sources said Arouri left Turkey in late 2015 for Qatar and later Lebanon. They declined to give his current location.

(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Interpol approves membership for State of Palestine over Israeli objections

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the 72nd United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., September 20, 2017. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

By Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Interpol voted on Wednesday to admit the State of Palestine as a member over Israeli objections at the international police organization’s general assembly in Beijing.

The decision came despite Israeli efforts to delay a vote and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that the Palestinians’ joining the global police agency contravened signed agreements with Israel.

Israel had argued that Palestine is not a state and that it is ineligible to join. Under interim Israeli-Palestinian peace deals, a Palestinian Authority was granted limited self-rule in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Shortly before the vote in the Chinese capital, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said Israel’s efforts to delay the ballot until next year had failed.

“This victory was made possible because of the principled position of the majority of Interpol members,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said in a statement.

Interpol said membership applications by the State of Palestine and the Solomon Islands were approved at its annual general assembly by more than the required two-thirds majority of votes. The organization now has 192 members.

A Palestinian bid to join last year, at an Interpol conference in Indonesia, was foiled by what Israel said was its diplomatic campaign against it.

In 2012, the U.N. General Assembly upgraded the Palestinian Authority’s observer status at the United Nations to “non-member state” from “entity”, like the Vatican.

The step fell short of full U.N. membership, but it had important legal implications in enabling the Palestinians to join the International Criminal Court and other world bodies.

Netanyahu’s statement said Palestinian membership of Interpol was one of the issues discussed during a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, who is visiting the region.

Netanyahu also raised the Palestinian refusal to condemn an attack on Tuesday in which a Palestinian laborer shot dead three Israeli guards in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“The actions of the Palestinian leadership in the past few days directly harm the prospects of achieving peace and the Palestinian diplomatic offensive will not go unanswered,” the statement said.

Some Israeli media commentators have voiced concern that as an Interpol member, Palestine could ask the organization to issue a “Red Notice”, an alert to police worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest an individual, pending extradition.

But the procedure does not appear to pose serious legal problems for Israelis such as government officials and military officers whom pro-Palestinian groups have sought to have arrested by local authorities as suspected war criminals during overseas visits.

A red notice is not an international arrest warrant, and on its website Interpol notes that it cannot compel any member country to detain an individual named in one.

(Editing by Maayan Lubell and Mark Heinrich)

Palestinian gunman kills three Israeli guards at West Bank settlement

Israeli emergency and security personnel work at the scene where a police spokeswoman said a Palestinian gunman killed three Israelis guards and wounded a fourth in an attack on a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank before himself being shot dead, September 26, 2017. REUTERS/Ammar Awad

HAR ADAR, West Bank (Reuters) – A Palestinian man with security clearance to work at a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank opened fire at a checkpoint on Tuesday, killing two Israeli security guards and a paramilitary policeman.

The assailant, who was armed with a pistol and also seriously wounded a fourth Israeli, was shot dead, police said.

The incident was unusual in that the 37-year-old man had been issued an Israeli work permit – a process that entails security vetting – unlike most of the Palestinians involved in a wave of street attacks that began two years ago.

A police spokeswoman said the gunman approached Har Adar among a group of Palestinians who work at the settlement, and aroused the suspicion of guards at the entrance checkpoint.

Challenged to halt, the Palestinian “opened his shirt, drew a pistol and fired at the security staff and troopers at close range,” the spokeswoman said.

Residents of the settlement told Israeli media the man worked as a cleaner. One of them, Moish Berdichev, said he had domestic problems – his wife had left him – and speculated he may have carried out the attack knowing he would not survive.

“He was a guy with a good head on his shoulders. It’s a shame. Very sad,” Berdichev told Army Radio.

The Shin Bet internal security service identified the man as Nimr Jamal and said he had “severe personal and family issues, including domestic violence”.

The man lived in the nearby Palestinian village of Beit Suriq, the police said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in public remarks to his cabinet that the man’s house would be demolished and any work permits issued to his relatives would be revoked.

(Writing by Dan Williams and Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Palestinians vie with Israel over Muslim pilgrims to Jerusalem

Muslim tourists (front) walk up stairs during their visit to the compound known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem's Old City August 31, 2017. REUTERS/Ammar Awad

By Ali Sawafta and Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – On any given day, Muslim pilgrims arrive at a Middle East airport on a journey to one of Islam’s holiest sites.

At Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, they rub shoulders with larger groups of visitors – diaspora Jews and Christian tourists – many of them headed for the same destination, a 45-minute drive away: the sacred city of Jerusalem.

The Muslims are only a small part of the Holy Land’s religious tourism market. But both Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank are vying for their business.

They come mainly to pray at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque, in a compound that is one of the world’s most contested and volatile holy sites. Al-Aqsa is the most important shrine in Islam after Saudi Arabia’s Mecca and Medina, but less of a draw for foreign Muslims, many of whose countries spurn Israel or its claim of sovereignty over the eastern sector of Jerusalem, captured in the 1967 war.

Israel’s Tourism Ministry recorded 115,000 Muslim tourists in 2016 – 3 percent of the 3.8 million foreigners who arrived at its airports or land borders it controls with Jordan and Egypt.

Half of these Muslim tourists identified as pilgrims, the ministry said. Most of them – around 100,000 – came from Turkey, which recognizes Israel. But there were also some from Indonesia and Malaysia, which do not, and whose citizens Israel admits under special provisions for pilgrims.

Each Muslim tourist spends an average of $1,133 on the trip, the Israeli ministry said. Palestinians fret that too much of that goes to Israel and want the tourists to opt for alternative Palestinian venues in Jerusalem or the West Bank.

“We have been conducting a campaign to introduce Turkish tourist companies to Palestinian hotels in Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and we have started to see many of them booking their rooms in these hotels,” said Jereyes Qumseyah, spokesman for the Palestinian Tourism Ministry.

He said the Palestinians have permanent displays at major tourism conferences in Turkey.

The Palestinian ministry offered no statistics on the scope of foreign tourism to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But Qumseyah said Palestinians are also enjoying “big success” in teaming up their tour companies with counterparts in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Arab world so to draw more pilgrims.

POLITICS AND RELIGION

Beyond the economic benefits, Palestinians see such visits as cementing pan-Islamic sympathy for their goal of establishing a state with East Jerusalem – whose walled Old City is dominated by Al-Aqsa and the gilded Dome of the Rock – as their capital.

To that end, Palestinian religious authorities dispute an edict by Youssef Al-Qaradawi of Egypt, Sunni Islam’s top cleric, that non-Palestinian Muslims should not go to Jerusalem lest they be perceived as validating Israeli rule.

Even for Palestinians, access is not a given: Since their 2000 uprising against Israel, it has routinely restricted their travel to Jerusalem from the West Bank and imposed a tighter clampdown on the Gaza Strip, which is under Islamist Hamas rule.

Still, the senior Palestinian cleric, Grand Mufti Mohammad Hussein, sounded cautiously optimistic about foreign pilgrims.

“An increasing number of Muslims are visiting Al-Aqsa. Maybe the numbers are not as high as we had hoped, but we hope they will increase in days to come,” he told Reuters.

One British pilgrim, Adeel Sadiq, came to Al-Aqsa this week with 15 fellow Britons. “We want to show our support to the people here, that you are not alone and Al Masjed Al Aqsa (Al-Aqsa mosque) is for all Muslims,” he told a Palestinian reporter.

Israel has no counter-campaign aimed at attracting Muslim pilgrims. The Israeli Tourism Ministry said its marketing budget is allocated to countries in North and South America, Europe and the Far East and Russia, and does not include Turkey.

At the height of tensions in Jerusalem last month over Israeli controls on access to Al-Aqsa, Turkey’s Islamist-rooted president, Tayyip Erdogan, urged his compatriots to flock there in solidarity with the Palestinians.

The general manager of Turkish Airlines followed up with an ad offering $159 round-trip flights to “Jerusalem” – though in fact the planes land at Ben Gurion. Israel’s envoy to Ankara, Eitan Na’eh, tweeted in turn: “We will always be glad to warmly welcome Turkish tourists to Israel and our capital Jerusalem.”

(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and Ceyda Caglayan in Istanbul; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Giles Elgood)

Israel warns Hamas not to try to foil its anti-tunnel Gaza wall

FILE PHOTO - Heavy machinery can be seen at work along Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, as seen from Kfar Aza, southern Israel February 28, 2017. REUTERS/Amir Cohen/File Photo

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel warned Gaza’s Hamas rulers on Thursday not to try to foil its construction of a border wall designed to stop tunnels between the two sides.

It said it had mapped militant emplacements hidden under civilian sites in the Palestinian enclave that may be attacked in any new war.

Hamas accused Israel of belligerence.

The unusually detailed Israeli threat followed a rocket launch on Tuesday which caused no damage in Israel and went unclaimed by Gazan groups. Israel responded with an air strike on a Hamas facility that medics said wounded seven people.

Such flare-ups have been relatively rare since the last Gaza war, in 2014, with Hamas mostly holding fire and reining in smaller militant factions.

But as Gaza’s poverty and political drift deepens, both sides worry another conflict could erupt.

In September, Israel went public with a sensor-equipped underground wall being planted on its side of the 37 mile- (60 km) long border, a counter-measure developed after Hamas fighters used tunnels to blindside its troops during the war.

Israeli media published new disclosures by the military on Thursday about the project, costing $1.1 billion and to be completed within two years under an accelerated schedule.

Israel has described it as a territorial counterpart to its Iron Dome short-range rocket interceptor, capable of blunting Hamas’s limited means of challenging its superior armed forces.

“I think the other side will have to re-evaluate the situation in view of the barrier’s construction,” Haaretz newspaper quoted the chief of Israel’s southern command, Major-General Eyal Zamir, as saying in the media briefing.

“If Hamas chooses to go to war over the barrier, it will be a worthy reason (for Israel) to go to war over. But the barrier will be built.”

The military also published aerial photographs and coordinates of two Gaza buildings that it said Hamas was using as cover for tunnel networks. One of these, it said, is a Hamas member’s family home, linked to a mosque by a secret passage.

“These two targets, as far as I’m concerned, are legitimate military targets, and in the event that a new war begins, anybody in them is endangering himself, his family, and the responsibility (for their wellbeing) will fall on Hamas,” Zamir said in a separate briefing to foreign journalists.

A Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum called the Israeli statements “lies and fabrications that aim to damage the image of the Palestinian resistance and justify the mass killing of thousands of Palestinians civilians”.

More than 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed in the 2014 war, according to the Gaza health ministry. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were killed.

A new buffer zone within Israel’s territory, dozens of meters (yards) in width, will afford it extra time to respond by depriving Hamas tunnelers of targets on the frontier.

Israeli media said on Thursday that the military also planned to build an underwater barrier in the Mediterranean to prevent infiltration from Gaza by sea.

(Reporting by Dan Williams; Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

Jordan’s King Abdullah discusses holy site tensions in Ramallah

Jordan's King Abdullah II walks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during a reception ceremony in the West Bank city of Ramallah, August 7, 2017.

By Ali Sawafta

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Jordan’s King Abdullah met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Monday for the first time in five years to discuss tensions at a Jerusalem holy site and wider political developments.

While the two leaders meet fairly frequently in Amman and other regional capitals, Abdullah has not visited Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, since December 2012.

The king flew in by helicopter, with the visit coordinated with Israeli authorities which control all entrance and exit points to the West Bank, including its 150 km (93 mile) border with Jordan and the air space above.

The visit comes two weeks since a surge in violence in Jerusalem after Israel installed metal detectors at Muslim entrances to the Al Aqsa mosque compound, following the killing of two Israeli policemen.

The change in security led to days of protests and clashes between Palestinian worshippers and Israeli security forces before Israel, after consultations with Jordan, decided to remove the metal detectors and other measures.

Jordan has been the custodian of Jerusalem’s Muslim holy sites since the 1920s. The compound, which sits on a tree-lined plateau in the Old City, is also revered by Jews, who call it Temple Mount, the site of two destroyed ancient Jewish temples.

“We discussed all issues of mutual interest and we agreed to form a crisis committee that will continue contacts to evaluate what has happened, the lessons to be learned and the challenges we may face at Al Aqsa mosque,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Reyad Al-Maliki told reporters after the meeting.

Jordan, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 and has growing, if little discussed, economic ties with its neighbor, often plays a mediating role in the region.

With a large percentage of Jordan’s population made up of Palestinians, and Jordan sharing a border with the West Bank, which the Palestinians want for their own state together with East Jerusalem and Gaza, its position is sensitive.

Maliki said Abbas and Abdullah also discussed U.S.-led efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which have been suspended for the past three years, and stated that Israel must “recognize the principle of a two-state solution and end provocative settlement activity that is designed to prevent the establishment of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.”

President Donald Trump’s regional envoy, Jason Greenblatt, has made several trips to Amman, Ramallah and Jerusalem this year to try to find common ground and Maliki said U.S. envoys were expected to visit again in the coming days but there is little sign of enthusiasm on anyone’s part to restart talks.

Abdullah is also playing a role in liaising with Egypt and others to see if long-standing differences between Abbas’s Western-backed Fatah party and the rival Hamas Islamist movement can be resolved and Maliki said the issue was discussed.

Hamas, which won the last parliamentary elections held in the Palestinian territories in 2005, seized full control of Gaza after a struggle with Fatah in 2007.

Over the past several months, Abbas, as head of the Palestinian Authority, has stepped up pressure on Hamas, cutting off salaries for civil servants in Gaza, limiting payments for electricity imports and some medicines.

The aim appears to be to oust Hamas from power, but there is little sign of that happening and efforts are being made by regional powers to resolve the internal fighting.

 

(Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza, Writing by Luke Baker and Ori Lewis, Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

 

Reign of sewage in biblical valley may be coming to an end

Sewage flows in Kidron Valley, on the outskirts of Jerusalem July 6, 2017. Picture taken July 6, 2017.

By Ari Rabinovitch

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – There is a foul smell coming from the biblical Kidron Valley.

It’s so bad that King David and Jesus, who are said to have walked there thousands of years ago, would today need to take a detour to reach Jerusalem.

For decades now a quarter of Jerusalem’s sewage has flowed openly in the Kidron valley, meandering down the city’s foothills and through the Judean desert to the east. At its worst, the pollution leaks into the Dead Sea.

The stream runs back and forth between land under Israeli and Palestinian administration, making a fix hard to find. But finally it seems a solution has been reached.

Authorities on both sides have agreed to drain the valley of sewage. According to the plan, a pipeline will be constructed carrying the wastewater directly to new treatment facilities. Each side will fund and build the section that runs through its territory.

Until that happens, however, about 12 million cubic meters of sewage continue to flow through the valley each year.

“Of course it’s damaging the environment and the ecological system,” said Shony Goldberger, director of the Jerusalem district in Israel’s Environmental Protection Ministry.

“It’s dangerous and hazardous to the health of the people in many ways.”

Added to Jerusalem’s sewage along the stream’s 30 km (19 mile) descent through the occupied West Bank is effluent from Bethlehem and nearby Arab villages.

Plants grow anomalously in what should be a dry wadi, animals come to drink, and mounds of baby wipes flushed down thousands of toilets sporadically coagulate along the banks. Sewage seeps into the earth, risking contamination of ground water.

Toward the end of the journey it gathers in a makeshift collection pool and much is used to irrigate date trees, which have a high tolerance for pollutants. But every so often gravity pulls the refuse toward the lowest spot on earth, the Dead Sea.

“It’s like a brown stain,” Goldberger said. “It stays disconnected from most of the salty water of the Dead Sea.”

With Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at an impasse, projects that require even minor cross-border coordination seldom get done. Israel captured the West Bank in a 1967 war, but under interim peace deals the Palestinians exercise limited self-rule in part of the territory.

“After decades of not being able to solve the problem, for a thousand and one reasons, professional and political, we reached an agreement for building a pipeline in the valley,” Major General Yoav Mordechai, the coordinator of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank, told Reuters.

The Palestinian Water Authority said the agreement was reached out of an “interest to clean the area,” but emphasized the two sides were working separately.

While they are both are optimistic, some scepticism remains, since similar plans in past never gained traction.

“We were talking about it, planning it, every time it took two, three, four years. You think you have it, and then the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a truck coming at you,” said Goldberger.

“I hope this solution will reach the stage where it is built.”

 

(Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)