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As of Jan. 1, there were 517,407 Jews living in the area, not including eastern Jerusalem.

Akiva Van Koningsveld

(JNS)

The Jewish population in Judea and Samaria grew by almost 15,000 people last year, according to an annual report compiled by former Israeli lawmaker Ya’akov Katz and based on Interior Ministry data.

As of Jan. 1, 2024, a total of 517,407 Jews lived in the area, which Israel liberated during the 1967 Six-Day War, up from 502,991 on the same date in 2023.

The 500,000-plus Jews living in Judea and Samaria account for an estimated 3.3% of the Jews in the world.

Katz’s figure does not include the nearly 350,000 Jews living in the eastern part of Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim despite it being part of the Jewish state’s capital.

Last year’s growth amounts to a 2.87% increase, the report said. Israel’s total population grew by 1.9% in 2023, per the Central Bureau of Statistics.

“Despite massive internal Israeli media attempts to delegitimize residents of Judea and Samaria, and despite international pressures to halt the growth of the population, the Jewish population in Judea and Samaria continues to blossom at a rate much higher than the rest of the country,” Baruch Gordon, director of the annual report, told JNS.

The Jewish population in Judea and Samaria has grown 15.11% since 2019, when 449,508 Jews lived in the area, according to the report.

Some of the fastest-growing towns include Mevo Dotan in northern Samaria, Ma’ale Amos and Nokdim in eastern Gush Etzion, and the Jordan Valley farming communities of Masu’a and Na’ama.

The report projects the Jewish population in the area to reach 613,554 by 2030; 706,233 by 2035; and 1,020,506 by 2047.

“If construction in Judea and Samaria will become a priority, as it as under the administration of [former Israeli Prime Minister] Yitzhak Shamir between 1990 and 1992, when they built 65,000 [housing] units, then we will reach a million Jews in Judea and Samaria at a much faster rate,” stated Gordon.

“Alongside that, we will solve a huge housing crisis in Israel at a very low cost to the government,” said Gordon.

“You’ve got plenty of state-owned lands in Judean and Samaria that are not far from the center that could 100% solve the housing crisis and return to the situation where every young couple will have within its reach the ability to purchase an apartment,” he explained.

Between Oct. 7 and Jan. 15, the Hatzalah Judea and Samaria rescue group recorded more than 2,600 terrorist attacks against Israelis in the area, including 760 cases of rock-throwing, 551 fire bombings, 12 attempted or successful stabbings and nine vehicular assaults.

“Anyone who is serious about bringing about a peaceful solution must take into account that the Jews are here to stay in Judea and Samaria,” said Gordon.

According to the researcher, “no one” in the Biden administration regards the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria as a feasible prospect under the current conditions, despite paying “lip service to their voters.”

“They all understand that an overwhelming majority of the Israeli population is against it, and Palestinians are against it,” he said, citing 2014 remarks to that effect in The New York Times by Tareq Abbas, son of Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas.

“I think that’s an important statement—that the son of the leader of the Palestinian party, a prominent Ramallah businessman—faced reality 10 years ago and told his father: There’s no change for a state; there are [Jewish] houses everywhere, so let’s just get equal rights like Israeli Arabs, and that way, we can go to the sea, see our cousins in Jaffa and have business deals with people in Tel Aviv,” noted Gordon.

Image: An Israeli flag in the Jordan Valley, near the community of Ma’ale Efraim, Jan. 2, 2014. Photo by Uri Lenz/Flash90.

“Treatment, coupled with the successful surgery, offers a promising prognosis for the child’s recovery.”

Pesach Benson

(JNS)

Israeli surgeons had successfully removed a massive tumor, weighing 1.3 kilograms, from a four-year-old girl, the Emek Medical Center in Afula said on Tuesday.

“The tumor, which constituted over 7% of the girl’s body weight, was discovered after the child’s mother noticed abdominal swelling and hardness during bath time,” explained Dr. Marc Arkovitz, director of the hospital’s pediatric surgery department.

Subsequent imaging tests revealed a sizable mass, measuring 16 by 12 centimeters [6.2 by 4.7 inches] in the right kidney—an exceedingly rare condition for a child of this age, Arkovitz stressed.

Following the successful surgery, which also involved removing infected lymph nodes, the toddler recovered within a day in the pediatric intensive care unit. “She quickly resumed normal activities, eating, and playing, demonstrating the resilience of pediatric patients,” said Arkovitz.

The toddler will continue her treatment journey under the care of the hospital’s pediatric oncology unit. Dr. Sergey Postovsky, Emek’s director of pediatric oncology, said the tumor, known as a Wilms tumor, accounts for only 4% of childhood cancer cases. Despite its rarity, Emek has treated six children with similar tumors in the past two years.

The exact cause of Wilms tumor is not fully understood, but it is believed to involve genetic mutations that occur early in fetal development. With treatment, the overall survival rate is around 90%. Postovsky said the girl’s treatment plan includes chemotherapy, radiation therapy and ongoing medical monitoring.

“The combination of these treatments, coupled with the successful surgery, offers a promising prognosis for the child’s recovery,” said Postovsky.

Image: Sergey Postovsky (left) and Dr. Marc Arkovitz of the Emek Medical Center in Afula. Credit: Emek Medical Center spokesperson.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, also known as “The Green Prince,” is the son of a Hamas co-founder.

(JNS)

Mosab Hassan Yousef, also known as “The Green Prince,” the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, has joined Israel’s public diplomacy campaign amid Israel’s war against the terror group.

Yousef, who rejected terrorism and went to work helping fight against it, arrived in Israel and toured the areas of the Oct. 7 massacre in the Western Negev.

Referring to Hamas’s Charter calling for the genocide of Jews, he said, “The people that wrote the Hamas Covenant are a bunch of lunatics,” adding, “The Arab world needs to pay attention to the dangers within.”

Hamas, he said, “does not care about people. In effect, they are sacrificing the lives of children and non-combatants in order to achieve cheap political goals. The concept of jihad must be stopped, and it must be stopped now.”

Yousef has been a vocal critic of any negotiations with Hamas and since Oct. 7 has called on Israel to destroy the terror group.

Yousef, 45, was born in Ramallah and became involved in Hamas activities as a youth. He was viewed as an eventual successor to his father in the terror organization. But while in Israel’s Megiddo Prison during his early adulthood, Yousef began to question Hamas’s ideology and tactics and became disillusioned with the organization.

He accepted an offer from the Israel Security Agency to become an informer on condition that Israel would try to arrest, not kill, the targets of his intelligence tips.

As the son of Sheikh Yousef, he was privy to many Hamas plans. For around a decade, the intelligence he provided the ISA foiled numerous suicide bombing attacks and assassination attempts, and exposed terror cells. Within the ISA, he was referred to as “The Green Prince.”

In 2010, Yousef published his autobiography, “Son of Hamas.” He converted to Christianity and currently lives in the United States.

Sheikh Yousef has been in and out of Israeli prisons for years. Israel arrested him in Ramallah on Oct. 19 during a crackdown on Hamas following the Oct. 7 attacks.

In November, Mosab Hassan Yousef called on Israel to set a time limit for Hamas to release the remaining 136 Israeli hostages, and to kill his father and other Hamas leaders if they don’t.

“Hamas must have a timeframe—a month or two or six months—to return the hostages, and if they don’t return the hostages within the time frame, Israel must execute top Hamas leaders in prison, especially the mass murderers,” said Yousef in a video message posted online.

“When I say execute top Hamas leaders, I mean no exceptions. That includes my own father, the co-founder of the Hamas movement. In this war, there are no exceptions,” added Yousef. “I made a mistake, 10 or 15 years ago, when I saved his life many times…he was supposed to die for his actions. I saved his life. Things did not change, things got worse,” he added.

He warned that Hamas is intentionally dragging out negotiations to extend the ceasefire with Israel.

“Hamas is going nowhere, and if we continue to negotiate with them, they will continue stretching these negotiations, taking us into a rabbit hole that will never end. And this is their goal: to get away with their crimes. We cannot allow this to happen,” he stressed.

Image: Mosab Hassan Yousef speaks at the annual Jerusalem Post Conference held in New York City, May 22, 2016. Photo by Marc Israel Sellem/POOL.