Iran accuses Israel of ‘failed’ cyber attack

Far-right group launches crowdfunding campaign with eye on Knesset

The far-right Otzma Yehudit group has launched a crowdfunding campaign in order to run for the Knesset in elections next year.

The group’s leaders, Itamar Ben Gvir, Bentzi Gopstein, Michael Ben Ari and Baruch Marzel star in a campaign video in which they present the legislation they intend to advance if they are voted into the Knesset. This includes a plan to “remove enemies from the State of Israel,” a vow to ensure that the High Court of Justice acts both “Jewishly and nationalistically,” and a law requiring Israelis to kill anyone who carries out an attack against them.

“A thousand of our enemies will die and not a hair will be touched on our soldiers’ heads,” Gopstein declares in the video.

Remand extended for truck driver involved in accident that killed 6 near Dead Sea

The Petah Tikva Magistrate’s Court extends by three days the arrest the detention of a truck driver who is suspected of causing another deadly accident on Route 90, in which six people died yesterday.

In that fatal crash, a minibus was reportedly shuttling a group of East Jerusalem Palestinian men in their thirties to their workplace when it collided with the truck.

The victims of the crash were identified as brothers Lutfi and Rajai Zahdi from Wadi Joz; Ala’a Qarash from the Old City of Jerusalem; Ahmad al-Ayoubi from Za’im; Majd Asila from Kafr Akab; and Majd Samara from Kafr Akab.

Video footage from the scene appeared to show the truck veering into the opposite lane, at which point the minivan, in an attempt to evade it, swerves and crashes into it.

The driver has claimed in court that the accident was the minibus driver’s fault because he swerved into the path of his truck.

A police investigator has told the court that the driver has kept silent during his investigation and that he apparently tried to take the memory card out of the dashcam fitted in the truck.

Arrest extended for driver suspected of causing crash that wiped out family of 8

Beersheba Magistrate’s Court extends by seven days the arrest of a man suspected of killing eight members of the same family in a head-on collision between his SUV and a minivan driving in the opposite lane.

The driver’s name was cleared for publication and he was identified as Laurent Ankri, 52 from Giv’on Hahadasha.

The entire Atar family — Yariv Atar, 45, and his wife Shoshi, 47, and their children Yaakov Yisrael, 12, Ateret, 11, Ayelet, 9, Moriah, 7, Yedid, 5, and Avigail, 3 — was killed in the crash Tuesday on Route 90.

Iran accuses Israel of ‘failed’ cyber attack

Iran accuses Israel of launching what it declared was a failed cyber attack against its communications systems.

“A regime whose record in using cyber weapons is clear from cases such as Stuxnet has tried this time to damage Iran’s communication infrastructure,” says Information Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi on his Twitter account.

He was referring to the Stuxnet virus, discovered in 2010 and believed to have been engineered by Israel and the United States, which damaged nuclear facilities in Iran.

“Thanks to vigilance of the technical teams, they returned empty-handed. We will follow up this hostile action through international forums,” Jahromi says.

His deputy, Hamid Fattahi, says technical teams had intercepted multiple attempts to infiltrate their systems early on Monday, and had been “strongly warded off.”

The Stuxnet virus was uncovered some eight years ago, and was widely reported to have been developed together by US and Israeli intelligence. It penetrated Iran’s rogue nuclear program, taking control and sabotaging parts of its enrichment processes by speeding up its centrifuges.

— AFP