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ISRAEL

Israel blasts Sweden over organ harvesting report

Israel has announced that it intends to lodge an official protest to Sweden over its refusal to condemn an article in a national newspaper which claimed Israeli soldiers harvest the organs of dead Palestinians.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman slammed Stockholm for distancing itself from a statement by Sweden’s Ambassador to Israel Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier expressing outrage at the article.

“Lieberman will send Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt a strong protest over the foreign ministry’s distancing from the condemnation published by the ambassador,” the ministry said in a statement.

“It is regrettable that the Swedish foreign ministry does not intervene when it comes to a blood libel against Jews, which reminds one of Sweden’s conduct during World War II when it also did not intervene,” the statement quoted Lieberman as saying.

“Freedom of press means the freedom to publish the truth and not lies.”

Sweden’s Aftonbladet newspaper claimed on Monday that Israeli soldiers snatched Palestinian youths and returned their dismembered bodies a few days later, sparking a storm of outrage in Israel.

A spokeswoman for Sweden’s foreign ministry on Thursday said that “the Tel Aviv embassy must have responded in accordance to the public opinion in Israel.”

Lieberman further instructed his ministry to examine the possibility of revoking press credentials from the newspaper’s representative in the Jewish state.

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ISRAEL

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street

A former Israeli soldier was attacked in the German capital Berlin, police said Saturday, with one or several unknown assailants spraying him with an irritant and throwing him to the ground.

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street
Israeli soldiers on operation near the Gaza Strip. Photo: dpa | Ilia Yefimovich

The 29-year-old was wearing a top with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) logo when the attackers started harassing him on Friday about his religion, the police added, calling it “an anti-Semitic attack”.

Officers are seeking the assailants, who fled immediately after the attack, on suspicion of a politically-motivated crime.

Saturday is the second anniversary of an attack by a far-right gunman on a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle, who killed two in a rampage when he failed to break into the house of worship.

It was one of a string of incidents that led authorities to declare the far right and neo-Nazis Germany’s top security threat.

Also this week, a musician claimed he was turned away from a hotel in eastern city Leipzig for wearing a Star-of-David pendant.

While the allegations prompted a fierce response from a Jewish community unsettled by increasing anti-Semitic crimes, several investigations have been mounted into contradictory accounts of the incident.

In 2019, police recorded 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes, an increase of 13 percent year-on-year.

“The threat is complex and comes from different directions” from jihadists to the far right, the federal government’s commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism Felix Klein said recently.

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