The Times reports that a group of right-wing Israelis have filed a petition demanding that the country’s health ministry remove the PLO chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, from a lung transplant waiting list. Mr. Erekat is in need of the transplant as years of heavy smoking have left him with pulmonary fibrosis.

The i reports on Elor Azaria beginning his 18-month prison sentence yesterday. Azaria was convicted of manslaughter for the killing of a wounded and incapacitated Palestinian assailant who had previously stabbed a soldier.

Much of the Israeli media is critical of Prime Minister’s Netanyahu’s speech at yesterday Likud rally. Yossi Verter in Haaretz described it as a “Trump-style rally” and “wild, inciting and inflammatory” suggesting it was a preview of Israel’s next election, while Raoul Wootliff of Times of Israel wrote that it had “echoes of Trump’s war against the media”.

Writing in Yediot Ahronoth, Nahum Barnea says that “Netanyahu isn’‎t telling them the truth when he describes the investigations into his affairs as a conspiracy being plotted by a hidden enemy (the media? The left?) to replace the government. The person in charge of the investigations is the police commissioner whom he appointed…The person who makes the decisions on those cases is the attorney general whom he appointed, a man who served under him as cabinet secretary…The media’‎s influence over their decisions is smaller than the media’‎s influence over Netanyahu’‎s decisions. It isn’‎t the left, which is quietly dying, or the media that worry him. Mandelblit, Alsheich and the detectives worry him. That is where he is aiming his arrows. Don’‎t you dare touch me, he is saying to them, the people are with me”. In Maariv, Ben Caspit writes that “‎The prime minister… repeated time and again his invention, which bears absolutely no resemblance to reality. According to that invention, there is ‘them’ and ‘us’. ‎They ‎are the conspirators who want to topple him. The left, the media, the anti-Semites as such, that same miserable and devious group of post-Zionist well-poisoners who, on their way to selling out the homeland to the Arabs, have decided to topple Netanyahu.”

In other news, Army Radio reports that the IDF demolished the houses of the three terrorists who killed Border Policewoman Hadas Malka in the attack in Jerusalem about two months ago. Clashes broke out in the town as the forces were in the process of demolishing the buildings.

Haaretz, Jerusalem Post and Maariv all report on details of a barrier Israel is building along the Gaza border.

Army Radio reports that Australian company Aristocrat Leisure is due to buy Israel-based social gaming company Plarium Global for £300 million.