News in Brief

Vice Premier Haim Ramon and Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz called for the building of a fence along the southern border to prevent illegal entries via Egypt. In the last year, 3,000 such entries were recorded, Ramon told Kadima MKs Monday. Mofaz said a fence would also reduce drug smuggling and trafficking in women. (Shahar Ilan)

The government company charged with returning the property of Holocaust victims to their heirs made its first payment yesterday to a 96-year-old survivor of Dr. Mengele's "experiments" in Auschwitz. Margot Lieber (nee Deutsche) of Haifa received one-third of the amount accrued from deposits in the Anglo-Palestine bank made by her late father-in-law during the 1930s. The remainder is to go to other heirs to the estate. Lieber's husband, Philip Deutsche, and their two young children were killed in the Holocaust. (Jack Khoury)

A Rehovot man was killed yesterday morning when his van collided with a gate on Moshav Beit Elazary. Police believe the victim, who was about 76, crashed into a gate separating one part of the community from the rest. "We are guessing that the gate was partially open and the driver thought he could get through it," Shfela Traffic Police Superintendent Ya'akov Cohen said. "But when he did, a pipe in the gate went through the windshield and hit him in the head." The victim was pronounced dead at the scene. (Yigal Hai)

A resident of Holon, 24, was killed early yesterday morning after falling from the roof of a four-story building in Petah Tikva to which he was applying tar. Paramedics who rushed to the scene prounounced the man dead at the scene. The police ruled the incident a work accident and reported it to the Labor Ministry. In a second work accident yesterday, a road contractor in Netanya was trapped when a wall fell on him while digging out sewer tunnels. The contractor, 48 and a resident of Elyachin, was rescued by firefighters and paramedics, and brought in serious but stable condition to Hadera's Hillel Yaffeh Medical Center. (Yigal Hai)

The Ombudsman of the Israeli Judiciary, former Supreme Court justice Tova Strasberg-Cohen, had harsh words for critics of the Supreme Court during a Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee discussion of her office's annual report yesterday. "There are no boundaries. Everything is permitted," Strasberg-Cohen said. She criticized what she termed "the campaign to delegitimize the courts on the part of various sectors," giving as an example demonstrations by tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox against the Supreme Court after the 1999 bribery conviction of former Shas Party leader Aryeh Deri. (Shahar Ilan)

A 60-year-old Holon woman who criticized a policeman for parking in a prohibited zone while he wrote tickets, partially blocking her way into a parking lot, faces multiple charges and fines. In April Rachel Isaac was given a ticket by the officer, who also threatened to handcuff her, charged her with obstruction and added six points to her license. Isaac wrote Public Security Minister Avi Dichter and Police Commissioner David Cohen, who sent the complaint back to the Ayalon District police. The latter supported the officer's actions. Isaac will have to appear in Traffic Court in October. (Roni Singer-Heruti)