Shorts: Mideast

Alleged Turkey terrorists nabbed

jerusalem (jta) | Turkish authorities have cracked an al-Qaida cell that planned to hit an Israeli tourist target, an Israeli official said.

"People, weapons, means of transport and communication equipment were nabbed there belonging to a cell linked to al-Qaida. It intended to carry out an attack at sea and, apparently, on land in foreign tourist centers," Danny Arditi, the director of the Israeli government's Counter-Terrorism Headquarters, told Israel's Channel Two television this week.

The disclosure came a day after the headquarters urged Israelis not to visit the southern Turkish coast, out of fear of terrorist attack.




Israel said to hold Holocaust assets

jerusalem (jta) | Israel holds some 1,000 pieces of real estate owned by Jews who perished in the Holocaust, Israel's custodian general said.

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported this week that Shlomo Shahar told a subcommittee of the Israeli government's Law and Constitution Committee that Israel also has some 500 other assets and 3,500 bank accounts of Holocaust victims.




Number of poor Israelis increase

jerusalem (jta) | Almost one in four Israelis lives below the poverty line, the government said.

According to the National Insurance Institute report published this week, 1.5 million Israelis were defined as poor in 2004, a rise from the previous year.

Analysts attributed the trend to government welfare cuts, a move the Finance Ministry has said aims to encourage employment. The findings come a week after the Central Bureau of Statistics reported an unprecedented polarization of wage differences in Israel.




Ancient water system discovered

jerusalem (jta) | Archaeologists uncovered an ancient water system outside Jerusalem.

Two months of digging at Kibbutz Tzuba ended this week when the rock-hewn conduction network dating to the time of King Hezekiah in the 8th century B.C.E. was unearthed.

Last year the site received worldwide attention with the discovery of a cave said to have been used by John the Baptist and his followers for baptism.

It was a monumental enterprise with a vertical shaft, an open horizontal corridor, a flight of stone steps above a tunnel and three external plastered pools, all of which were on a slope above an underground reservoir.