Municipal officials have urged the Defense Ministry to station additional infantry units, expand drone surveillance, and reinforce the perimeter with advanced detection systems.

By Hezy Laing

Residents of Rosh HaAyin are calling for a significant increase in IDF forces around the city amid growing fears of a potential Palestinian invasion from nearby Arab settlements.

The city, which sits on the edge of the Samaria region and borders several Palestinian towns, has long been considered a sensitive security zone.

But the current regional instability has heightened concerns, prompting local leaders to demand immediate reinforcement of military patrols and surveillance.

In recent weeks, residents have reported a rise in attempted border breaches, suspicious movements near the security fence, and increased activity by hostile elements in adjacent territories.

While the IDF has responded with targeted operations and expanded intelligence gathering, community leaders argue that the current deployment is insufficient for the evolving threat.

They warn that the city’s proximity to open terrain and unfortified access routes makes it particularly vulnerable to a surprise infiltration attempt.

Since October 7, Hamas and Fatah members have made repeated threats to invade central Israel.

Municipal officials have urged the Defense Ministry to station additional infantry units, expand drone surveillance, and reinforce the perimeter with advanced detection systems.

They emphasize that Rosh HaAyin is not only a residential hub but also a strategic gateway to the densely populated Gush Dan region. A successful infiltration, they argue, could endanger thousands and disrupt the country’s economic heartland.

Residents have echoed these concerns, organizing community meetings and petitioning for a stronger military presence.

Many point to recent attacks in other parts of the country as evidence that complacency is not an option. Parents of school‑aged children have been particularly vocal, requesting increased patrols near educational institutions and public parks.

The IDF has acknowledged the concerns and stated that it is continuously evaluating force distribution based on real‑time intelligence.

Military officials note that several defensive upgrades are already underway, including expanded observation posts and rapid‑response teams positioned closer to the city’s outskirts.

Still, for many in Rosh HaAyin, reassurance will only come with visible, sustained reinforcement.

As tensions remain high across the region, the city’s residents insist that proactive defense—not reactive response—is the only way to prevent a potential infiltration and ensure the safety of their community.

The post Central Israeli city demands increased IDF presence to prevent Palestinian invasion appeared first on World Israel News.

A runaway camel turned heads in central Israel, casually strolling past stunned pedestrians and baffled vets.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

A wild camel trotting through the streets of a city in central Israel caused a stir on Tuesday, as municipal veterinarians tried and failed to capture the animal.

Videos circulating on social media showed the camel calmly walking through Rosh HaAyin’s industrial park, as motorists drove around the animal and stunned pedestrians stared.

Camel on the loose in Rosh Haayin. Middle East vibes. pic.twitter.com/5iSQSpE9P1

— Yoel Israel (@YoelTIsrael) April 22, 2025

“Suddenly, we saw a camel running outside our office,” Maayan, who was identified only by her first name, told Hebrew-language media outlet Channel 12 News.

“We were shocked; on the one hand, it was funny, but on the other hand, it was really dangerous.”

While camel sightings are common in Israel’s southern Negev desert, the dromedaries are not typically seen in central Israel.

“The municipal veterinary service rushed to the scene and tried to persuade the camel to cooperate, but, being a camel, he had other plans,” the Rosh HaAyin municipality posted on social media.

According to witnesses, after evading capture, the camel returned to the neighboring Arab city of Kfar Kassem. The camel’s owner is believed to live there.

In a separate incident on Tuesday, police rescued several exotic animals from a suspected criminal’s home.

During a police raid, officers found a wild lemur, which originated in Madagascar, that was being kept in poor conditions in the Netanya suburb of Even Yehuda.

Several exotic iguanas were also found in the house.

“This is the first time in Israel that we have found a lemur in a private home. It is a very sensitive animal that cannot be kept [as a pet] by private citizens,” Uri Laniel, a senior official from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, said in a media statement.

“This is a serious case of animal abuse. The poor lemur was kept in isolation and was given food that was not suitable for it. Its health is not good.”

The lemur will be transferred to a wildlife sanctuary for rehabilitation.

The post Wild camel sparks chaos in central Israel city, evades capture appeared first on World Israel News.

‘They are gathering ammunition, drawing up plans and waiting for the opportune moment. The danger is massive, growing, and imminent,’ says Naomi Kahn, director of Regavim’s International Division.

By John Hasten, JNS

Standing on the roof of her apartment building on the eastern tip of the central Israeli town of Rosh HaAyin, just meters away from the security barrier, Moriah Tzafar shares a grave concern.

“We see [Palestinian Authority] cars driving around, getting closer to us. What are they doing here? The area is a closed military firing zone [Zone 203]. We see them carrying out tours of the fence line. There are cars, people, illegal housing, and they’re getting closer. We report this every day to the authorities,” she says.

“It reminds us of the [female] IDF spotters overlooking the Gaza border. We didn’t listen to the spotters before Oct. 7, 2023, how is it possible the same concept still exists, that we are [still] relying on a fence?”

Tzafar spoke during a press tour organized by the Regavim Movement this past Monday aimed at exposing security threats to Israelis living in the center of the country.

The P.A. has constructed nearly 17,000 illegal structures within a kilometer of Israel’s security fence, which stretches roughly along the 1949 Armistice Line from the Gilboa area in the north down to Ein Gedi near the Dead Sea.

According to Naomi Kahn, director of Regavim’s International Division, the security threat in the center of the country is pressing.

“The level of danger to Israelis living near the seamline is not a possibility, it is a reality. There have already been incursions and terrorist attacks in seamline communities and deep into Israel,” she told JNS.

“The level of danger is higher than we’d like to admit, as massive quantities of arms are coming in through Judea and Samaria [via Jordan] because the Gaza border is secured and northern border is in the process of being secured, so the Iranian proxies and anti-Israel forces are concentrating their efforts on the much longer and less protected seamline area,” she said.

“They are gathering ammunition, drawing up plans and waiting for the opportune moment. The danger is massive, growing, and imminent.”

Kahn explained that during the Oslo Accords the seam line was created to prevent an Oct. 7-style scenario by forming a buffer zone and increasing Israel’s reaction time against a potential hostile invasion.

However, despite the fact that it is illegal under international law to enter, build, plant, or make any physical changes within 500 meters of the security barrier, the P.A. constantly does so, she said.

In 2002, during the height of the Second Intifada, the Israeli government began construction of the security fence along the seam line in an attempt to prevent terrorist incursions into the center of the country.

However, according to Regavim, the state has ignored the P.A. attempts to annex Area C of Judea and Samaria, and no steps have been taken push back against the illegal encroachment on state lands, which includes the construction of 90,000 illegal structures in areas under full Israeli jurisdiction.

At the same time, the security fence has be sabotaged repeatedly, to the point that many kilometers of the barrier have been completely demolished.

Rani Gavriel, the head of Rosh HaAyin’s auxiliary neighborhood patrol unit, working with local police to try and keep the community safe, told JNS that, “6,000 Arabs pour into Israel illegally on a daily basis.”

He described a constant battle against theft, sexual assault and terrorist attacks by Arabs who penetrate the seam line.

“The Arab’s best weapon is the olive tree,” he said. “Even if the olives aren’t ready to be picked, they are in the fields using the trees as cover to carry out surveillance. These people are just like Hamas or Hezbollah. They openly say that Rosh HaAyin is theirs.”

Gavriel said he has been warning of the threat for years, meeting with the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and Internal Security Committee back in 2021, but nobody is listening. “Oct. 7 wasn’t an isolated incident,” he warned. “We’re getting ready for the next one.”

Accompanied by a military escort, the group was taken into the nearby Firing Zone 203, located just to the east in Samaria.

Kahn explained that Israel set up many firing zones on state land following Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai under the 1979 peace agreement with Egypt.

Despite the fact that these training areas are closed military zones, Kahn said the P.A. encourages Arabs to move into them in order to create the illusion that ancient Arab villages existed there.

Firing Zone 203 is home to massive illegal construction, with beautiful villas and sports fields. E.M. (who asked that his name be withheld) the land protection officer for the Shomron Regional Council, who led the tour of the area, pointed out that we were traveling on a brand-new paved east/west route extending closer and closer to Rosh HaAyin.

“When we see the illegal construction we report it to the Civil Administration,” he told JNS.

“They are working, but not doing enough. It’s time to wake up, destroy the illegal construction and take a stand against the P.A., which is being funded by foreign entities.”

In the firing zone, Barak Werker, CEO of the Green Now organization, focused on the environmental damage to the area caused by the P.A., which he said affects P.A. Arabs and Israelis alike.

“When it comes to environmental issues, there are no borders. The seamline doesn’t exist,” he said.

Back in Rosh HaAyin, Moriah Tzafar had told the group her family suffers daily due to illegal burning of waste carried out by P.A. Arabs. “We are forced to sleep with the windows closed every night” she explained.

Werker stressed how the P.A. acts like a third world country, causing air pollution through illegal burns, especially of electronic waste, as well as water pollution by dumping raw sewage into streams.

In his view, both Israel and the P.A. need to put politics aside, and one entity needs to be created to handle all environmental issues.

Heading a bit further to the east in Samaria, the group was taken to the Avichai cattle farm, established on top of a hill on state land by Eitan Melet and his family more than a year ago.

With clear views of Rosh HaAyin and Tel Aviv to the west, Melet told JNS, “We are here protecting the seamline communities through a constant Jewish presence.”

The Arab terrorists who carried out the 2022 terrorist attack in the city of Elad in which four Israelis were murdered, had set out from the area in which the farm is now located, he said, implying that the attack could have been prevented had there been an Israeli presence in the area at the time.

“Our purpose is to safeguard the land of Israel,” said Melet.

When asked what Israel could do to increase security in the post-Oct. 7 reality, Kahn said, “The government must treat our enemies as enemies. It must stop living under the false concept of enabling Arabs to come through and providing the Arabs with economic incentives not to attack us. We saw along the Gaza border that that is a completely false assumption, but that’s still an assumption that forms the basis of Israel’s policy. That has to be changed.”

Israel, she continued, must “take the P.A. at its word—it intends to create a Palestinian state in all of Judea and Samaria, and we have to look carefully at what the P.A. has done up till now with its security forces. A P.A. state will not be one that intends to live in peaceful coexistence. Dozens of Israelis have been murdered by the official P.A. police forces while hundreds have been wounded. Their security apparatus is aimed at us and is waiting simply for the opportune moment to unleash another Oct. 7 upon us,” she added.

According to Kahn, “Regavim is collecting the information and analyzing it and making sure our decision makers, most importantly our political leadership, understands what’s happening on the ground.”

The organization also initiates lawsuits “that force the government of Israel to take notice, respond and explain its failure to act. And through those court cases we expose the underlying misconceptions and dispel them. We propose alternatives to the failed paradigms that we see are still in operation and we try to encourage our politicians to act in our national interests by first and foremost treating our enemies like enemies,” she said.

The post The looming terror threat in central Israel appeared first on World Israel News.

Security forces track down suspect who stabbed, seriously wounded man in Rosh Ha’ayin.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

A Palestinian suspected of stabbing and seriously wounding an Israeli man 10 days ago was arrested along with several accomplices, the Shabak General Security Service (GSS) announced Tuesday.

On August 15 a resident of Ashkelon was stabbed and seriously injured at a construction site in Rosh Ha’ayin, allegedly by a Palestinian who was staying illegally in Israel.

Although the ambulance crew that responded to the scene initially reported the man had been injured in a street fight, the GSS, in cooperation with the police and the IDF, began intensive intelligence and operational activities to locate the stabber on suspicion that it was a terrorist attack.

The GSS said that with the help of intelligence reports, the suspect was arrested on August 20 in Jenin and was taken in for questioning.

Police said that in addition to the suspected stabber, three others were arrested on suspicion of aiding the attacker.

The identities of the suspects and other details of the investigation are restricted under a court gag order.

The unidentified Israeli man in his 30s was visiting his new apartment in a building that is under construction in the city of Rosh Ha’ayin, 13 kilometers (8 miles) east of Tel Aviv. He encountered a Palestinian on one of the first floors of the building where his apartment is located and was stabbed numerous times.

The Palestinian attacker fled and the man managed to stumble outside before collapsing at the entrance to the building. He lay there bleeding until a passerby noticed him some time later and called for an ambulance and the police.

Magen David Adom ambulance officials initially thought the man had been stabbed in a brawl and reported that they gave him life-saving treatment, “which included stopping bleeding, bandages and giving fluids, and we evacuated him urgently to the hospital when his condition was serious and unstable.”

The post Palestinian who stabbed Israeli arrested, terror now suspected appeared first on World Israel News.

Israeli students chance upon an impressive First Temple-era water reservoir. 

A huge 2,700-year-old water system was recently exposed at an archaeological site near Rosh Ha-Ayin, in the center of Israel, with the help of students majoring in the Education Ministry’s Land of Israel and Archaeology studies program.

As has been the case on many previous occasions in Israel, the archeological find was unexpectedly unearthed during excavations conducted ahead of a construction project, in this case a new residential neighborhood.

In antiquity, rainwater collection and storage was a necessity. With an annual rainfall of 500 millimeters, the region’s winter rains would have easily filled the huge reservoir, which is nearly 20 meters long and reaches a depth of over four meters.

On its walls, near the entrance, researchers identified engravings of human figures, crosses, and a vegetal motif that were probably carved by passersby in a later period. Overall, seven figures measuring 15–30 cm were identified. Most have outstretched arms and a few appear to be holding some kind of object

Gilad Itach, director of excavations on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), said that “it is difficult not to be impressed by the sight of the immense underground reservoir quarried out so many years ago.”

The excavations reveal that the reservoir was built beneath a large structure with walls that are all nearly 50 meters long. Some of the potsherds found on the floors of the rooms probably belonged to vessels used to draw water from the reservoir.

Researchers believe that it is highly likely that the structure and the reservoir were built at the end of the Iron Age, the late 8^th or early 7^th century BCE. While the building was abandoned during the Persian period, the reservoir was still in use until modern times.

In recent years, a number of other farmsteads built at the end of the First Temple period were discovered near Rosh Ha-Ayin. They were probably erected after the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel in 720 BCE, when the Assyrian empire dominated the region.

The IAA notes that the establishment of farmhouses in this area is interesting, given the fact that many regions within the decimated Kingdom of Israel remained desolate.

Some scholars believe that the establishment of the farmsteads was motivated by the empire’s wish to settle the area, which lay on an international route and near the western border of the Assyrian empire.

“The structure exposed in this excavation is different from most of the previously discovered farmsteads,” Itach pointed out. “Its orderly plan, vast area, strong walls, and the impressive water reservoir hewn beneath it suggest that the site was administrative in nature and it may well have controlled the surrounding farmsteads.”

High-school students participated in the excavations as part of a new educational program, which is designed to connect students with the past and train the archaeologists of tomorrow.

Students opting for this track as part of their chosen matriculation assessment join an excavation for a week. They experience the various tasks involved in the excavation, discuss the research questions and archaeological considerations, and document the dig in the excavation journal as part of their research work.

The site will remain an open area accessible to the public, adjacent to the new residential neighborhood.

By: Aryeh Savir, World Israel News

The post Israeli students discover First Temple-era water system appeared first on World Israel News.