News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) Defense Minister Ehud Barak and National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin (Fouad) Ben-Eliezer have canceled a birthday celebration that the two had scheduled for February 12.  The two decided to call off the shared party, which was to mark Barak’s 66th birthday and Ben-Eliezer’s 72nd, following a rocket attack on Sderot that badly wounded two young brothers.

“We cannot celebrate when Sderot is hit by Kassams every hour,” an official in Ben-Eliezer’s office explained.  Some organizers disagreed with the decision, and said the party should have gone on as planned in order to show that terrorism would not win.

Thousands of guests, many of them Labor party officials and activists, were invited to the event, and singers Eyal Golan and Shlomi Shabbat had agreed to perform.  The event was to be paid for by private Labor party donors.