2009 in Israel - Events

Events

• January – the Tamar gas field was discovered in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Israel.
• February 10 – The Elections for the 18th Knesset are held in Israel. The Likud party wins 27 seats and Kadima 28; however, the right-wing camp wins a majority of seats, and President Shimon Peres called on Benjamin Netanyahu to form the government.
• March 19 – Former Israeli president Moshe Katsav is formally indicted in a Tel Aviv court for rape and other sexual offences against three women who had worked with him.
• March 31 – Benjamin Netanyahu presents his cabinet for a Knesset "Vote of Confidence". The 32nd Government is approved that day by a majority of 69 to 45 and the members are sworn in.
• April 4 – Tel Aviv's official centennial celebrations open at the Rabin Square.
• May 11–15 – Pope Benedict XVI visits Israel and the Palestinian territories. During his visit, the pope condemned Holocaust denials and called for cooperation between the Palestinians and Israelis.
• June 8 – Former Finance Minister Avraham Hirschson is convicted of embezzling millions of shekels from the National Workers Labor Federation during the period in which he served as its chairman.
• June 24 – Former Finance Minister Avraham Hirschson is sentenced to five years and five months of jail and a fine of 450,000 shekels.
• June 25 – During the 2009 NBA Draft, the Israeli basketball player Omri Casspi is selected 23rd overall by the Sacramento Kings. making him the first Israeli to be selected in the first round of the NBA draft. With his debut with the Kings on October 28, 2009, Casspi becomes the first Israeli to play in the NBA league.
• July 12–24 – The 2009 Maccabiah Games are held.
• August 1 – Two killed and at least fifteen are injured in a shooting at the "Bar-Noar" LGBT center in Tel Aviv.
• August 20 – Leading Israeli TV personality Dudu Topaz commits suicide in the Nitzan Detention Center in Ramla, by hanging himself in his prison cell, while awaited trial on charges of assaulting top media Israeli media executives.
• August 30 – Ehud Olmert is indicted on three counts of corruption, becoming the first ex-Prime Minister of Israel to face criminal charges.
• September 1 – Former Finance Minister Avraham Hirschson arrives at the Hermon prison facility to begin serving his five-year sentence.
• September 13 – An Israeli Air Force F-16A crashes while on a training flight over the southern Hebron hills, killing pilot Captain Assaf Ramon. Assaf was the son of Ilan Ramon, a former F-16 pilot and Israel's first astronaut, who was killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
• September 24 – In an address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Netanyahu said Iran poses a threat to the peace of the world and that it is incumbent on the world body to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons.
• September 25 – The trial of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on corruption charges begins in Jerusalem. He is the first ever Israeli Prime Minister to be brought to trial.
• November 4 – Operation Four Species: Israeli navy commandos of Shayetet 13 board and seize the MV Francop cargo ship in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and its cargo of hundreds of tons of weapons allegedly bound from the Islamic Republic of Iran for Hezbollah in Lebanon.
• November 14 – More than 1,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrate outside the offices of U.S. firm Intel in Israel in protest at work taking place at the site on Jewish Sabbath.
• December 10 – Ada Yonath received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz for her studies on the structure and function of the ribosome, becoming the first Israeli woman to win the Nobel Prize out of nine Israeli Nobel laureates, the first woman from the Middle East to win a Nobel prize in the sciences, and the first woman in 45 years to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
• December 12 – The Israeli government passes a highly controversial bill calling for the creation of a biometric database of all Israeli citizens, which would contain their fingerprints and facial contours.

• On August 30 Ehud Olmert was indicted on three counts of corruption, becoming the first ex-Prime Minister of Israel to face criminal charges.

• Leading Israeli TV personality Dudu Topaz commits suicide in prison while awaited trial over assaulting top Israeli media executives.

• Ada Yonath is awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

• Omri Casspi becomes the first Israeli to play in the NBA league.