Jerusalem’s Mayor Nir Barkat has reached a deal with ultra-Orthodox leaders to carve up the city’s neighborhoods along religious lines, in a move which critics say is aimed at guaranteeing him ultra-Orthodox support for the next mayoral elections, due 2018.

The deal was reached with a committee of rabbis, the Haaretz newspaper reported Wednesday. It sets out what will happen in mixed neighborhoods — ultra-Orthodox and non-Orthodox, where ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods will be built in the future, and where cultural centers, which primarily serve secular and non-Orthodox religious residents, will be created.

Jewish visitors to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount on Monday did something that many are calling a prophetic breakthrough–they prayed, openly and without harassment.

Typically, non-Muslim visitors to Judaism’s holiest site are accompanied by officials from the Islamic Trust (Waqf) to ensure they don’t engage in acts of Christian or Jewish worship, which in the eyes of Muslims would desecrate the sacred compound that is today occupied by several mosques.

The government of Israel told the nation’s Supreme Court that it plans to expand and upgrade a space for non-Orthodox prayer at the southern section of the Western Wall near Robinson’s Arch.

The government made the declaration in documents submitted to the court in response to a petition filed by the non-Orthodox Jewish movements and the Women of the Wall group that calls on the state to create the permanent space for egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall.

The Roman Amphitheater and the hippodrome in the ancient Israeli coastal city of Caesarea have been sold off, in secret, to a mysterious overseas holding company by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate.

In total, over 700 dunams of land (172 acres) in Caesarea were sold in deal last month, Channel 2 news revealed on Sunday, including large chunks of what is designated as a historic national park.

The twisted ram’s horn shofar sounded loudly through the hills at Shiloh, signaling the end to another day’s search for the biblical holy tabernacle. As elusive as the Ark of the Covenant that it housed during the Israelites’ travels from Egypt through their settlement in Canaan, the tabernacle is depicted in the Bible (Exodus 25:8-9) as the earthly home for God — God’s “dwelling place” among his people.

Repeated excavations have attempted to find earthly evidence of the godly home, here at Shiloh and elsewhere. Similarly, many archaeologists have sought artifacts and evidence tying Joshua’s biblical Israelite conquest of Shiloh to this site. None has succeeded.

Two more dead ibexes were found Saturday in Nahal Ashalim, two weeks after a massive spill poured tens of thousands of tons of acid waste through the nature reserve in southern Israel.

The find means that eight of the 26 ibexes believed to live in the area of the southern Judean desert have died since the leak in late June.

The extreme trauma experienced by Holocaust survivors has severe implications on their health even tens of years later, with an Israeli study finding that they were far more likely to get certain forms of cancer.

The study, which was published earlier this month by the American Cancer Society’s Cancer journal, examined 152,622 Holocaust survivors over the course of 45 years in Israel. It compared cancer rates among those who were entitled to compensation for their experiences versus those who were not, as well as those who were from countries ruled by the Nazis and those who were not.

Security forces in Jerusalem were on high alert following a shooting attack near the Lions Gate on the Temple Mount in the Old City on Friday morning.

Three terrorists opened fire, killing two police officers and wounding another before being shot dead themselves by responding police.