Israel is located in an area of intense and ongoing seismic activity, and needs to be ready to cope in the event of an earthquake - possibly a catastrophic one.

According to a report carried on Israel National News (INN) Thursday, Israel Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai warned of the danger that could strike 'more unexpectedly than the Yom Kippur War of 1973.'

It was essential that local authorities be as prepared as possible to meet the needs of disaster victims - both military and natural - for a number of days.

Vilnai toured northern communities including Akko, Safed and Tiberias.

According to INN, increased seismic activity in Israel's north last year led the government to begin preparing for the possibility of a major earthquake.

The Knesset (Israel's parliament) annually debates and discusses the state of Israel's readiness for a major temblor.

"Statistically" the country is due for a serious quake at any time.

The Obama administration continued its efforts this week to pull or push Israel into moving ahead with Washington's decreed solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Known as the "two state solution," it calls for the cutting in half of the historical homeland of the Jewish people and the creation of an Arab state called Palestine on the high ground overlooking what would be left of Israel.

Utilizing a special conference of foreign leaders being hosted in Jerusalem by Israeli President Shimon Peres, the White House instructed its ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, to try and woo the Netanyahu government into moving ahead with the land-for-peace process.

Rice gave what The Jerusalem Post Thursday described as "a warm and empathetic speech towards Israel."

It was important to decided, Rice gently chided her guests, "whether we are serious about peace or whether we will lend it only lip service."

"The time has come to relaunch negotiations without preconditions that address the permanent-status issues: security for Israelis and Palestinians, borders, refugees and Jerusalem, she said.

President Barack Obama and his officials have a "clear goal," she stressed: "a comprehensive peace, including two states living side by side in peace and security - a Jewish State of Israel, with true security for all Israelis, and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967 and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people."

This, insisted Rice, was "in the interests of the United States, of Israel and of the Palestinians."

Obama - recently awarded the once-prestigious Nobel Peace Prize despite having not ended wars anywhere on the planet - has expressed his wish to be the one who successfully secures peace in the Middle East.

Covering the American's speech, Post reporter Herb Keinon maintained that "ending the Israeli occupation" (leftist-speak for surrendering land to the murderous leaders of the PLO and Hamas) "is generally agreeable to Israel."

A great many Israelis have wearied of weathering decades of unrelenting international pressure on the Jewish state to embrace the discredited "peace process"

Rice's suggestion that Israel does little more than talk disregards the record of enormous and often dangerous risks successive governments in Jerusalem have taken to demonstrate their good faith in the pursuit of peace.

Israel has withdrawn from 99 percent of the formerly "IDF-occupied" Arab population centers in Samaria and Judea, giving the Arabs there freedom to govern themselves. Four years ago, the Israeli government forcefully uprooted 10,000 of its own citizens, and handed the entire Gaza Strip to the Arabs.

Earlier in the decade Israel agreed to give the "Palestinians" all this territory including parts of the Jewish capital of Jerusalem. Israel's holiest site - the Temple Mount - was offered too.

By vivid contrast, the Arab side has taken not a single step towards ending hostility towards Israel; on the contrary "Palestinian" mosques, schools and media feed their people on a daily dose of Israel-hatred and talk about the day when "all of Palestine will be liberated, from the Jordan River to the mediterranean Sea."

Not only "radical" Hamas leaders, but "moderate" PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas regularly incites his people against the Jews.

The lull in terrorist attacks on Israel buses, shopping malls and restaurants is attributable to ongoing and intensive anti-terrorism measures employed by the Jewish state, whose forces nightly arrest terror suspects in "the West Bank" and have successfully helped keep the cap on the kind of eruptions that cost hundreds of Jewish lives earlier in this decade.

For the Obama administration, however, the key lies in forbidding and putting an end to Jewish settlement in the heart of the Land of the Bible.

"Being serious about peace means understanding that tomorrow need not look like yesterday," Rice said, as if addressing a class of school students.

If Israel would only realize this, it would be able to "find peace, security, and prosperity with not just its immediate neighbors but in the region as a whole."

And then, Israel could "truly and fully take its rightful place among the nations."

US President Barack Obama last week firmly aligned his administration with the Arab world, joining the rest of the international community in its position against the Jewish State of Israel.

Addressing some 140 world leaders gathered in New York for the 64th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, Obama condemned as an illegal "occupation" Israel's presence in its ancestral homeland.

And he roundly rejected the right of Jews to live and build communities in the hill country they believe was given to them by their God.

But while, according to the American leader, Israel's people have no right to possess, dwell in and govern the land of their fathers, the United States must insist that Israel "respect the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians."

Obama's position indicates his acceptance and intention to champion the Arab narrative - which insists that the "Palestinians" have lived in the land "from time immemorial" and have the right to be formed as a nation in it.

He has thus rejected the Jewish narrative - which holds that this was the Land of Canaan given to Abraham, then Isaac, then Jacob and then Jacob's descendants; that the nation took root here nearly 4000 years ago, growing and developing in this land and ruling as sovereigns over it; that following the Jews' expulsion from the land they kept burning for two millennia the fire of their intended return; that they are not a foreign implant, not a colony, not in the land in order to assuage stricken western consciences following the Holocaust; that the Palestinian Arabs have no national history - neither in this land nor anywhere else, and that the creation of an Arab state in the historical Jewish homeland constitutes land theft and poses an existential threat to Israel.

Critics slammed Obama's speech as the most anti-Israel message ever delivered by a president of the United States.

America's former ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, slammed Obama's address as "the most radical anti-Israel speech I can recall any president making."

The fact that the most powerful man on the planet, who has access to all the data, expertise and intelligence necessary to substantiate the Jewish position and to disprove the Arab one, nonetheless has chosen to throw his weight behind the latter at Israel's expense, is certain to have distressed many in the US.

"It felt as if a dagger had struck my heart when he stated that "America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," said Pastor Cecil Hall of the Anderson, TX, Full Gospel Church, adding that it "hurt, to think of the minds and hearts of the citizens of Israel as they heard those words from the country that has stood with them since the beginning."

"Although the words of Mr. Obama came from within the borders of my beloved America, they did not come from the heart of America. Please tell the wonderful people of Israel that the strong moral majority of Americans do not share Barak Obama's sentiment nor agree with his policies concerning Israel, at any time that those polices should harm or cause Israel to lose ground."

Investments Norway divested from the Israeli arms firm Elbit were part of a private fund and did not represent the country's policy, the country's minister of foreign affairs told Defense Minster Ehud Barak on Friday.

The United States is funding a Palestinian Authority project to place non-Hebrew road signs throughout Judea and Samaria. The PA plans to implement it in exclusively Israeli-controlled areas as well.

'Palestinian' official tells Ynet, 'Every country in world believes danger to peace is Israeli settlement policy, so we must translate this into sanctions'.

The Arab League chief says any Israeli offer for a settlement freeze that doesn't include east Jerusalem is unacceptable and "will suspend the peace process."

Pressure on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu inside the Likud will intensify next week ahead of his final decisions regarding a potential settlement freeze as part of US President Barack Obama's efforts to seek Middle East peace.

It was unclear if Washington had prior knowledge of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's plan to approve hundreds of new housing units in (Samaria and Judea) before considering a brief settlement freeze, but Kurt Hoyer, spokesman for the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, said it was "doubtful" the Obama administration had signed off on the decision.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned approval of the construction of hundreds of new housing units in [Judean and Samarian] settlements is "unacceptable," Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Friday in Paris.

In a move certain to cause consternation in the Arab world, but likely to relieve pressure from within his own Likud party, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu next week intends to approve plans for hundreds of new housing units in the [Judea and Samaria]. Only after this new building is green-lighted will he consider a moratorium "for a few months" on further construction, a senior source in the Prime Minister's Office told The Jerusalem Post Thursday night.

The leader of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip said Thursday that he affirmed his group's warm ties with Iran during a late-night telephone conversation with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The quality of counterfeit Israeli identity cards produced by Palestinians has increased in recent months, IDF officers warned on Thursday.

A Russian news agency reported that a special investigation team, including representatives from five European countries, plans to probe the hijacking of the Russian vessel 'The Arctic Sea'.

The Israel Air Force struck a smuggling tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip Thursday night.

JERUSALEM - For the first time, a former Israeli prime minister will soon be in the defendant's chair in a criminal court.

More than two years after the state proposed building 13 schools in Sderot and the Gaza periphery that would be reinforced against rocket and mortar attacks, no work has been performed on nine of them.