[IMPORTANT] Hamas launches foot assault against settlements.

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Strangely when the US conducts strikes it "does not collect data on how much collateral damage is inflicted on civilians?" in retaliation for 3 US serviceman. Yet when Israel does exactly the same over the deaths of 1200 of their civilians they are called genocidal?

Iran has certainly achieved it's goal from covertly financing the HAMAS Oct 7 attacks of destabilising the Sunni hegemony and destabilising it's mortal enemy Israel.

There is a lot of covert infiltration of HAMAS into Gaza based aid agencies who then divert funds/resources given as aid by the US and other western countries to HAMAS. HAMAS operatives have also infiltrated pro-Palestine groups/protests in western countries.

Iran and HAMAS are certainly winning the propaganda war.

Women serve in the IDF. Are armed women less legitimate targets merely because of their gender? By choosing to actively participate in the occupation they make themselves combatants and therefore legitimate targets.

Would like to check facts on number of dead upon initial Hamas rocket attack had read it was approx 300 deaths ..??
and many wounded ? Not included captured persons.Cannot cite the report on numbers initially killed..so must write imho .
But am glad this post represents some more balance reporting in this thread ???

Hamas has begun to resurface in areas where Israel withdrew the bulk of its forces a month ago, deploying police officers and making salary payments to some of its civil servants in Gaza City in recent days, four residents and a senior official in the militant group said Saturday.

Signs of a Hamas resurgence in Gaza’s largest city underscore the group’s resilience despite Israel’s deadly air and ground campaign in the four months since the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel that triggered the war. Israel says it’s determined to crush Hamas and prevent it from returning to power in Gaza, an enclave it has ruled since 2007.

In recent days, Israeli forces renewed strikes in the western and northwestern parts of Gaza City, including in areas where some of the salary distributions reportedly took place.

Four Gaza City residents told The Associated Press that in recent days, uniformed and plainclothes police officers deployed near police headquarters and other government offices, including near Shifa Hospital, the territory’s largest. The residents said they saw the return of civil servants and subsequent Israeli airstrikes near the makeshift offices.

The return of police marks an attempt to reinstate order in the devastated city after Israel withdrew a significant number of troops from northern Gaza last month, a Hamas official told AP, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

The official said the group’s leaders had given directions to reestablish order in parts of the north where Israeli forces had withdrawn, including by helping prevent the looting of shops and houses abandoned by residents who had heeded repeated Israeli evacuation orders and headed to southern Gaza.

Meanwhile, combat continued in southern Gaza.

At least 11 people were injured when Israel’s military fired smoke bombs at displaced people sheltering at the headquarters of the Palestinian Red Crescent in the southern city of Khan Younis, the organization said. It followed a siege that Israel’s military has laid on the Red Crescent’s facilities for 12 days, the organization said.

The charity said it had documented the killing of 43 people, including three staff members, inside the buildings by Israeli fire in those 12 days, with another 153 injured.

Israel’s military didn’t address the charity’s allegations of firing on the buildings, the killings or the blocking of access, and asserted that the Al-Amal Hospital facilities had adequate fuel and electricity and that the military helped to replenish two oxygen tanks.

The military said operations in Khan Younis would continue for several days.

At least 17 people, including women and children, were killed in two separate airstrikes overnight in Gaza’s southernmost town of Rafah on the border with Egypt, according to the registration office at Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital, where the bodies were taken.

The first strike hit a residential building east of Rafah, killing at least 13 people from the Hijazi family. The dead included four women and three children, hospital officials said.

“Two children are still under the rubble, and we don’t, still we don’t know anything about them,” relative Ahmad Hijazi said.

The second struck a house in Rafah’s Jeneina area, killing at least two men and two women from the Hams family.

The Health Ministry in Gaza said Saturday that 107 people were killed over the past 24 hours, bringing the wartime total to 27,238. More than 66,000 people have been wounded.

The conflict has leveled vast swaths of the tiny coastal enclave, displaced 85 percent of its population and pushed a quarter of residents to starvation.

More than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has taken refuge in Rafah and surrounding areas. A United Nations official on Friday said Rafah was becoming a “pressure cooker of despair.”

Israel’s defense minister warned earlier in the week that Israel might expand combat to Rafah after focusing on Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza. While the statement alarmed aid officials and international diplomats, Israel would risk significantly disrupting strategic relationships with the United States and Egypt if it were to send troops into Rafah, a key entry point for aid.

Which leaves women who don't serve in the IDF and children

Israel is one of only a few countries where military service is compulsory for all able-bodied female citizens.

So I guess after all the death toll, HAMAS is back...and they are still holding Israeli hostages

That leaves a rather small number of adults as non-military.

Children should never be targeted by any actor in any armed conflict, but it's their extremist parents placing them in harm's way. As long as I'm expected to accept that logic regarding Palestinian kids killed by Israeli violence I have no choice but to respond in kind when the situation is reversed. The squatters should do the right thing and remove themselves from territory within Palestine they have no right to occupy. If they'd like to live there, they can become citizens of Palestine.

As long as they're there and acting as an additional wing of the Israeli military occupation I will have zero sympathy for them when they're targeted. I don't care about the precise legal status of every single incident, I care about getting the modern day Stern gang terrorists out of Palestine.

As long as they're there and acting as an additional wing of the Israeli military occupation I will have zero sympathy for them when they're targeted. I don't care about the precise legal status of every single incident, I care about getting the modern day Stern gang terrorists out of Palestine.

They are not back in full force though. They are still weakened and the ones left are probably working in smaller cells. So, it's more like an insurgency phase than having fully regained control of the region.

Also, the insurgency would be difficult to do without the tunnels. I guess that's why the IDF are flooding them.

Just because the country has conscription, that does not mean that the majority of adults can be considered to be military. If they are not in active military service, they are civilians, even if they have been conscripted before. Most conscriptions last a year, after that they're civilians again.

My understanding is these movements (Irgun, Hagganah and Stern gang) formed in retaliation to Palestinian attacks on Jewish immigrants trying to enter and live in British occupied Palestine from the 1930s.

So when HAMAS report a death toll it's legitimate but when the Israel government reports a death toll it's fake?

Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, as he tries to advance the cease-fire talks and pushes for a larger postwar settlement for the Gaza Strip. The meetings came after Saudi Arabia said it would not engage in diplomatic relations with Israel without recognition of an independent Palestinian state and an end to the assault on the enclave.

Hamas has proposed a cease-fire plan that would include the release of 1,500 prisoners, including 500 people serving life sentences, an Arab source has told NBC News. The proposal also includes that a three-year plan should be developed, with a road map to rebuild homes and other infrastructure destroyed in the war, the source said.

A Kata’ib Hezbollah commander was killed in a U.S. drone strike today in Baghdad as part of the country's response to an attack on American forces in the region two weeks ago. The U.S. first launched retaliatory strikes in both Iraq and Syria last week following an attack on a base in Jordan, which killed three U.S. soldiers.

Iran-backed Houthi militants fired six anti-ship ballistic missiles toward the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, a U.S. defense official told NBC News. Three of the missiles were attempting to hit a bulk carrier transiting the Gulf of Aden. Earlier, the Houthis released a statement threatening to "escalate more and more" unless the "aggression" against Gaza ends.

More than 27,700 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. More than 67,000 have been injured, and thousands more are missing and presumed dead.

Israeli military officials said at least 224

Israel would be willing to let Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar sail into exile in exchange for the release of all hostages and an end to the Hamas government in Gaza, a half-dozen Israeli officials and senior advisers have told NBC News.

The idea of exile to pave the way for a new, deradicalized Gaza governing body has been “on the table” since November, according to another senior adviser to the Israeli government. Officials and advisers discussed the idea with NBC News in early January.

The Israeli government had initially vowed to kill Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, the Hamas leaders who directed the Oct. 7 terror attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel and led to the kidnapping of 240 more. The idea of sending them and four other top leaders into exile instead, much as Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization fled Beirut on a ship 42 years ago, arose after the war’s start as a possible alternative means of removing Hamas leadership from Gaza.

“We don’t mind if [Sinwar] will leave like Arafat left Lebanon,” said a senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We will allow it to happen as long as all of the hostages are released.”

Two sources familiar with discussions inside the government said exile was just one of a set of proposals that Israelis floated to the U.S. that included replacing Hamas with hand-picked civilian leaders and reforming Gaza’s education system.

In 1982, as the Israel Defense Forces closed in on Beirut, where the PLO was then headquartered, the U.S. and other international mediators arranged an exit for members of the group and its leader. Hundreds of PLO fighters left Lebanon by ship, followed by Arafat, who lived in exile in Tunisia for a dozen years.

‘Magical solution’
Advisers to the Israeli War Cabinet working on scenarios for a post-Hamas Gaza acknowledge it’s unlikely that Sinwar would ever agree to setting sail.

As a former senior Israeli security official told NBC News, “[Exile] is this magical solution that everybody would want, but there’s absolutely no way Hamas would agree to that.”

In addition, Palestinian leaders and Arab governments are wary of any proposals from Israel about how Gaza should be governed in the future, according to foreign diplomats and former U.S. officials.

Israeli officials say they believe Sinwar and Deif are now hiding in tunnels deep below Khan Yunis and Rafah, in southern Gaza.