[IMPORTANT] Hamas launches foot assault against settlements.

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Problem is, that Jackson Hinkle is pro Putin. So his double standard is beyond belief.

The Hind's story seems true, and the IDF does target ambulances.

President Joe Biden has been venting his frustration in recent private conversations, some of them with campaign donors, over his inability to persuade Israel to change its military tactics in the Gaza Strip, and he has named Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the primary obstacle, according to five people directly familiar with his comments.

Biden has said he is trying to get Israel to agree to a cease-fire, but Netanyahu is “giving him hell” and is impossible to deal with, said the people familiar with Biden’s comments, who all asked not to be named.

“He just feels like this is enough,” one of the people said of the views expressed by Biden. “It has to stop.”

Biden has in recent weeks spoken privately about Netanyahu, a leader he has known for decades, with a candor that has surprised some of those on the receiving end of his comments, people familiar with them said. His descriptions of his dealings with Netanyahu are peppered with contemptuous references to Netanyahu as “this guy,” these people said. And in at least three recent instances, Biden has called Netanyahu an “as*hole,” according to three of the people directly familiar with his comments.

The bluntness of Biden’s private, unfiltered reflections on Netanyahu, as well as Israeli premier’s failure to shift tactics in Gaza, suggest that the dynamic between the two leaders could be nearing an inflection point.

Israel is planning a ground assault on Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where more than a million Palestinians displaced from northern Gaza are sheltering. Netanyahu has vowed to press ahead with the operation even though U.S. officials have repeatedly expressed their public opposition to it, unless Israel provides safe passage to Palestinian civilians.

On Sunday, Biden told Netanyahu in a phone call that he believes “a military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible and executable plan” for protecting and supporting the Palestinians sheltering there, the White House said in a statement.

The bulk of their 45-minute conversation focused on a long-discussed but repeatedly delayed agreement between Israel and Hamas to free hostages being held in Gaza in exchange for a pause in military operations and the release of Palestinian prisoners, according to the White House.

Yet, people familiar with Biden’s private comments said he has told them he believes it would be counterproductive for him to be too harsh on Netanyahu publicly.

Biden’s frustrations with Netanyahu have also not led to a major policy shift, but his administration has begun to consider such options. Two weeks ago, officials told NBC News that the administration was discussing delaying or slowing U.S. weapons sales to Israel as leverage to get Netanyahu to dial down Israeli military operations in Gaza and do more to protect civilians.

Yet, even as Biden has escalated his rhetoric, he is not yet prepared to make significant policy changes, officials said. He and his aides continue to believe his approach of unequivocally supporting Israel is the right one.

Some Democrats in Congress have called for putting conditions on U.S. aid to Israel. Other Democrats, including military veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, have cited that experience and questioned Israel’s tactics, arguing that heavy bombardment and steep civilian casualties are counterproductive methods that threaten to provide more fuel to extremists.

One irritant Biden has expressed in recent private conversations, according to the people familiar with his comments, is that he feels his administration keeps coming up with good deals for Israel, such as a recent one involving Saudi Arabia, only to have Netanyahu reject them.

A deal to release hostages and pause Israel’s military operations would cap weeks of high-level efforts by Biden and his top aides to secure a pact, which they hope might eventually lead to a long-term cease-fire.

In perhaps some of his rawest recent private moments, however, the president has said Netanyahu wants the war to drag on so he can remain in power, three of the people familiar with his comments said.

At a fundraiser Biden attended in the past few weeks, he spoke about Israel and his frustrations with Netanyahu to a small group of donors. In response to being thanked for standing with Israel and against antisemitism, Biden took the opportunity to lay out some of his views, according to a supporter who was present.

“I’m a Zionist,” Biden said, reiterating his views that Hamas must be destroyed and that Israel must be protected, according to the supporter.

But Biden also aired his frustration with Netanyahu, who is often referred to as “Bibi.”

“He did say Bibi started off great, but ‘he’s been a pain in my ass lately’ or ‘he’s been killing me lately’ — one of those things,” the person who was present for Biden’s comments recalled. “He goes, ‘But he’s doing a disservice … of late.’”

Israel’s military hailed the rescue of two hostages overnight in Rafah, while local officials said the raid killed dozens of people in the crowded, southern Gaza Strip city sheltering more than 1 million displaced people.

At least 67 people were killed in Israeli strikes, Palestinian Health Ministry spokesperson Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra said. An NBC News crew that has been working on the ground in Gaza since the start of the war described the bombing in the area of Shaboura camp of Rafah as a strikingly violent and deadly assault.

The dramatic rescue of Fernando Marman, 60, and Louis Har, 70, came amid mounting international concerns over a planned Israeli ground assault on Rafah.

Israeli forces retrieved the two Israeli men taken captive during the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in a “complex” overnight operation carried out "under fire in the heart of Rafah," Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said.

The operation included a "wave of strikes" to help "enable the force's disengagement" and strike Hamas operatives in the area, he said.

The strikes set off widespread panic, according to the NBC News crew, with crowds racing to take loved ones, including children, to the Kuwait Hospital.

Hagari said that Israeli forces had been preparing for the overnight operation "for some time" and that it was executed based on highly sensitive intelligence.

The IDF spokesman described how special forces breached a building "in the heart of Rafah" before locating Har and Marman on the second floor, where they were being held by armed Hamas militants.

A battle ensued, he said, with "heavy exchanges of fire at several locations simultaneously." Around the same time, he said, aerial fire was deployed in the area by the Israeli air force and Southern Command.

In a separate statement, the IDF, the Israeli Security Agency and Israel Police said both Har and Marman were in good medical condition and had been transferred for examination at the Sheba Tel-HaShomer Medical Center in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv.

Hospital officials confirmed to NBC News that the two men were receiving care there, while a photo released by Israeli officials showed them reuniting with loved ones at the medical facility.

Two Palestinians were shot and injured, and a pair of vehicles and a home were torched during violent settler attacks in the northern West Bank, several media outlets reported Monday.

Asira al-Qibliya Mayor Hafez Salah told Palestinian media that a violent group descended on the village from the flashpoint Yitzhar settlement. The group opened fire and threw rocks in clashes with residents, he said.

A 20-year-old man was shot in the stomach and a 16-year-old was hit in the hand.

Two Palestinians were shot and injured, and a pair of vehicles and a home were torched during violent settler attacks in the northern West Bank, several media outlets reported Monday.

Asira al-Qibliya Mayor Hafez Salah told Palestinian media that a violent group descended on the village from the flashpoint Yitzhar settlement. The group opened fire and threw rocks in clashes with residents, he said.

A 20-year-old man was shot in the stomach and a 16-year-old was hit in the hand.

In a later incident in the nearby village of Huwara, a truck belonging to a Palestinian was also set alight by settlers. The Wafa said the car belonged to Huwara resident Abdullah Odeh and that it was parked in front of his home.

The incidents come as Israel faces increasing pressure to crack down on settler violence, with both the United States and the United Kingdom slapping sanctions on extremist settlers alleged to have carried out attacks on Palestinians.

At least 10 Palestinians were killed and dozens of homes were torched across the West Bank in settler attacks in 2023, human rights group Yesh Din said in January.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on January 1 that there was a daily average of three settler-related incidents in the first eight months of 2023 compared to the two-per-day average in 2022 — the highest rate since the beginning of record-keeping in 2006.

Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said Monday that Cairo is committed to upholding its peace treaty with Israel, amid reports in recent days that the agreement may be in jeopardy if the military proceeds with an offensive on the Gazan city of Rafah, abutting the border with Egypt.

Cairo has expressed worries that an Israeli push into Rafah, which has swelled with Gazans displaced from parts of the Strip, could create a crush of refugees pushing into the Sinai desert and exacerbate a humanitarian crisis in the Strip.

Cairo’s top diplomat was asked about the potential impacts of such an assault on his country’s relations with Israel by a reporter .

There is a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, which has been in effect for the past 40 years and will continue to be. We are actively dealing with this matter at this stage,” Shoukry said, during a trip to Ljubljana, according to quotes carried by Sky News Arabic.

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Monday made a thinly veiled call on the U.S. to cut arms supplies to Israel due to high civilian casualties in its war in Gaza.

Borrell recalled that U.S. President Joe Biden said last week that Israel's response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack had been "over the top" and U.S. and other Western officials had repeatedly said too many civilians were being killed in Gaza.

"Well, if you believe that too many people are being killed, maybe you should provide less arms in order to prevent so many people being killed," Borrell told reporters after a meeting of EU development aid ministers in Brussels.

"If the international community believes that this is a slaughter, that too many people are being killed, maybe we have to think about the provision of arms," he added.

The U.S. is Israel's most important foreign arms provider. It gives Israel $3.8 billion in military aid annually, ranging from fighter jets to powerful bombs. Washington has so far not heeded any pleas to cut such aid.

Borrell also noted that a Dutch court on Monday ordered the government of the Netherlands to block all exports of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel over concerns they were being used in violations of international law in the Gaza war.

Borrell said it was contradictory for countries to repeatedly declare that Israel was killing too many civilians in Gaza but do nothing concrete to prevent the killing.

An Al Jazeera correspondent and a photojournalist have been seriously injured in an Israeli airstrike that allegedly targeted the pair while they were working in Gaza.

According to the Doha-based news network, Ismail Abu Omar, one of its correspondents, and his camera operator, Ahmad Matar, were in northern Rafah where they were documenting the living conditions of displaced Palestinian families when they were directly targeted by a missile fired by a drone.

The two journalists were transferred to Gaza’s European hospital, where doctors amputated Omar’s leg in an effort to save his life. Matar was described by Al Jazeera as being in a “serious condition”.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the two were hit in a strike from an Israeli warplane in the Moraj area. Video from the scene of the strike showed both men were wearing protective equipment that identified them as media.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has recorded the deaths of at least 85 journalists and media workers – 78 of them Palestinian – since the war erupted on 7 October. Four Israeli journalists were killed during Hamas’s attack, and three Lebanese journalists have also been killed in Israeli shelling.

Al Jazeera’s Gaza team has paid a particularly heavy price during the war. The channel’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, lost his wife, Amna, son Mahmoud, daughter Sham and grandson Adam in an Israeli air raid.

Dahdouh was later wounded in an Israeli drone strike that killed his colleague, the Al Jazeera camera operator Samer Abu Daqqa, while Dahdouh’s eldest son, Hamza, a journalist who also worked with Al Jazeera, was killed in an Israeli attack alongside fellow journalist Mustafa Thuraya.

Israeli forces pushed Thursday into Al Nasser hospital in southern Gaza, the largest hospital still functioning in the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory after four months of war, according to both the Israeli military and health officials in the enclave.

In a statement, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Daniel Hagari said Israel had "credible intelligence from a number of sources, including from released hostages, indicating that Hamas held hostages at the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis and that there may be bodies of our hostages in the Nasser hospital facility."

IDF forces enter Al Nasser hospital
The IDF said that it had apprehended an unspecified number of suspects inside the hospital and "contacted the Director of the Nasser Medical Center, calling for the immediate cessation of all Hamas terrorist activity from within the hospital."

The IDF did not immediately release evidence to back up its assertion that the hospital was being used as an operations hub by Hamas, but Hagari said it was merely the latest health facility in Gaza to be used by the militants in that way.

Ashraf Al Qedra, a spokesperson for the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, said IDF forces stormed the Nasser medical complex and turned it "into a military barracks after demolishing the southern wall.

The occupation targets the ambulance headquarters and the tents of the displaced, and bulldozes the mass graves inside the Nasser Medical Complex," he said in a statement posted online.

Al Qedra did not refute the IDF's statement saying Israeli forces had evacuated displaced families and the families of medical teams working at the hospital early Thursday morning, but he said the evacuations were carried out "under bombardment and threats."

The health ministry also said intensive care patients in the hospital were being kept in the facility without medical staff, "which puts their lives in extreme danger."

Médecins sans frontières said in a statement on Thursday that MSF staff inside the hospital "reported a chaotic situation, with an undetermined number of people killed and injured."

Netanyahu ignores warnings against Rafah offensive
The operation at Al Nasser in Khan Younis came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed his determination to push ahead with an offensive in the city of Rafah, about five miles south of Khan Younis, near the Gaza-Egypt border. The IDF has said Hamas still has four combat units hiding around the city, which it is determined to hunt down.

Roughly 80% of Gaza's population has been displaced and at least half of the enclave's 2.3 million people are now believed to be packed into Rafah, according to the United Nations.

U.N. Humanitarian Affairs chief Martin Griffiths warned Tuesday that a military operation in Rafah "could lead to a slaughter in Gaza" and "leave an already fragile humanitarian operation at death's door."

South Africa files new bid to restrain Israel at U.N. court
On Tuesday, South Africa's government filed an urgent request with the U.N's International Court of Justice, asking it to issue a new legal order to constrain Israel's military, specifically citing the "developing circumstances in Rafah."

"The South African Government has made an urgent request to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to consider whether the decision announced by Israel to extend its military operations in Rafah, which is the last refuge for surviving people in Gaza, requires that the court uses its power to prevent further imminent breach of the rights of Palestinians in Gaza," the South African presidency said in a social media post.

The Israeli military said it killed a senior Hezbollah commander in a strike carried out in Lebanon as the terror group vows retaliation.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced Thursday that an overnight airstrike targeting a "Hezbollah military structure" in Nabatieh killed Ali Muhammad Aldbas, a senior commander of the Radwan forces. His deputy commander, Ibrahim Issa, and an additional terrorist were killed in the attack, according to IDF.

"Aldbas was amongst those who directed the terrorist attack at the Megiddo Junction in Israel in March 2023. He led, planned, and carried out terrorist activity toward the State of Israel, especially during this war," the IDF said.

The Radwan Force is a special operation forces unit of Hezbollah specifically tasked with infiltrating and carrying out attacks in northern Israel.

Hezbollah on Thursday said Israel would pay "the price" for killing 10 people, including five children, in southern Lebanon in a separate airstrike the day before.

"The enemy will pay the price for these crimes," Hezbollah politician Hassan Fadlallah told Reuters. "The resistance will continue to practice its legitimate right to defend its people."

Several of the armed Lebanese group's fighters were also killed in separate strikes on Wednesday, including on Nabatieh, Reuters reported, citing Hezbollah officials and security sources.

The strikes came in response to a rocket barrage that struck several northern Israeli communities on Wednesday morning. One of those injured remains in serious condition, another received significant injuries and six others were lightly injured, according to local officials.

Gaza’s health ministry said Friday that electric generators cut out and all power was lost at a major Gaza hospital raided by Israeli forces a day earlier, leading to the deaths of four patients dependent on oxygen.

The Gaza health ministry said in posts on Facebook that the Israeli military was in control of the hospital, the Nasser Medical Complex, but did not specify how or why the generators had stopped. The claims could not be independently verified. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Israel’s military pushed into the Nasser complex, in the southern city of Khan Younis, in the predawn hours Thursday, smashing through the perimeter and entering the compound as explosions and gunfire rang out. The aid group Doctors Without Borders said Thursday that its staff had to evacuate but that the weakest patients had stayed behind.

The Israeli military had ordered all remaining staff and patients into one building, according to a voice memo from a doctor provided by the group.

arly Friday, the Hamas-run health ministry said on its Facebook page that the hospital’s power supply had cut out, endangering the lives of six adult patients and three infants in intensive care dependent on oxygen. About 40 minutes later, it said in another post that three of the patients had died, and a few hours later, a fourth.

The Israeli military’s evacuation orders before the raid on the Nasser complex, which had been the largest functioning hospital left in Gaza and had thousands of civilians sheltering on its grounds, sparked alarm from international observers.

“Nasser is the backbone of the health system in southern Gaza,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, wrote on X earlier in the week. “It must be protected.”

Israel’s military late Thursday said it was continuing its search of hospital grounds. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said its forces had not located any hostages taken in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. The military said earlier that its raid on the Nasser hospital was based partly on intelligence that captives had been held there and that their bodies may have been at the hospital grounds.

Admiral Hagari also identified three people he said were located on the grounds of Nasser Hospital linked to the Oct. 7 attacks or an armed group, in an apparent effort to shore up justification for its raid.

One man was an ambulance driver who had transported hostages into Gaza as part of the Hamas attacks, and another admitted to taking part in the killings on that day, Admiral Hagari said. A third man was a “known” member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, he said.

“We found more, dozens more,” he said, saying the military would provide additional details in coming days.

Several were killed and wounded including at least one physician and patient in Thursday morning’s incursion.

Israel’s military intelligence circulated a document to Israeli leaders this week warning that even if the IDF succeeds in dismantling Hamas as an organized military force in Gaza, it will survive as “a terror group and a guerrilla group,” according to a Channel 12 report aired Thursday evening.

The document, drawn up by the research division of IDF Military Intelligence, reportedly also states that “authentic support remains” for Hamas among Gazans.

Given that there is currently no practical effort being made to put in place a plan for Gaza on the “day after” the war, the document further warns, “Gaza will become an area in deep crisis.”

Channel 12 investigative journalist Ilana Dayan reported that the document was presented on Monday to Israel’s political echelon, after it was discussed last weekend by senior IDF officers, Shin Bet officials and members of the National Security Council.

The “bottom line” is that the document constitutes a warning from those in military intelligence who carry out such assessments, said Dayan, that “Hamas will survive this [IDF] campaign as a terror group and a guerrilla group.”

“In this regard, at least,” she suggested, “there won’t be absolute victory” — as predicted and demanded by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since the start of the war.

While Israeli officials have consistently publicly declared the goal of the war to be wiping out Hamas from the Strip, many countries and officials around the world have warned that it is not a feasible outcome.

US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in November that while Israel can dramatically reduce the threat from Hamas, eliminating the group and its ideology is likely impossible.

From the start of the war, IDF chief Herzi Halevi has generally spoken of “dismantling” rather than eliminating or eradicating Hamas, a term implicitly acknowledging that even a protracted war will not be able to destroy every military and terror threat from the Strip.

The assessment that Hamas will withstand Israel’s war aimed at its destruction is shared by Arab stakeholders in the region who met last week to advance a joint plan for Gaza’s reconstruction after the fighting ends.

Saudi Arabia, which hosted the meeting, invited Qatar to participate in a nod to Doha’s influence over Hamas whose political leaders it hosts.

The Arab countries that participated in last week’s meeting don’t want Hamas to be included in the political leadership of Gaza after the war, but they do believe that the terror group will manage to survive in some form and that a level of its acquiescence will be needed in order to successfully advance the rehabilitation of Gaza, a senior diplomat told The Times of Israel.