Israel’s beleaguered Chief Rabbinate, along with the Religious Services Ministry, issued a statement on Monday opposing legislation pending in the Knesset to bring regulation to the area of religious circumcision and the specialists (called mohels) who perform this rite. Lawmakers have pointed out the need to bring government oversight to circumcision as there are hundreds of individuals performing the ceremony who have no license from the Rabbinate and whose skill level is unknowable to a family who might hire them.

The Islamist terror militia Hamas issued a statement on Sunday warning of dire consequences from Israel’s decision to accede to a request by the Palestinian Authority to reduce the amount of electricity supplied to the Gaza Strip by 40%. “The Israeli occupation’s decision to reduce electricity to the strip at the behest of PA President Mahmoud Abbas is catastrophic and dangerous,” Hamas spokesman Abdel Latif al-Qanou said in an official statement. “It will hasten the deterioration of the situation and its explosion in the Strip.”

Sylvester Turner, Mayor of mega-city Houston in the US State of Texas, was in Israel this week at the head of a large delegation of business, civic and professional leaders in search of guidance on how to build a high-tech sector for his city’s economy. “With all the things we have going for us, we have not really played in this innovation technology space, so to speak, and there is no reason. All of the elements are there,” Turner told the Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Opposition leader Chaim Herzog gave an impassioned speech before the weekly meeting of his Zionist Union faction on Monday in which he declared, among other things, that recent efforts to enforce a code of ethics for University professors and lecturers amounted to progress towards Israel becoming a fascist country. “This a morally broken code,” he declared.

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat has greater personal credibility on anti-terrorism than most people. With regard to the terror attacks in Paris, Nice, Berlin, Manchester and London, he said, “I think the world is starting to understand what we’ve gone through. Radical Islam is active, more than it was in the past, and it forces people to rethink how they operate relative to the threat. We’ve done that.”