[IMPORTANT] Hamas launches foot assault against settlements.

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https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1843694164690846055

Bibi just casually threatening genocide against the Lebanese.

So he is admitting the destruction of Gaza; I wonder how it got totally destroyed; maybe it destroyed itself? /s

Muhammed Ismail al-Hweihi froze when he saw an Israeli soldier setting ablaze a makeshift tent with his daughter inside.

Duaa, a disabled 34-year-old, had been separated from her father, her sole carer, only a few minutes earlier.

Hweihi was forced to hastily flee the tent the family set up in the courtyard of a school-turned-shelter in northern Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp.

This was because Israeli troops had suddenly begun to fire live bullets inside the school ahead of storming it during a devastating three-week assault on the camp in May.

Duaa, who was unable to speak or move, was left behind inside the tent because her father couldn’t carry her.

After the soldiers entered the school under the cover of heavy fire, men and women were separated.

Moments later, a soldier poured gasoline on dozens of tents in courtyards before setting them on fire.

His voice drowned out by the hammering blast of tanks and heavy gunfire, Hweihi stood watching silently and hopelessly.

“She was burnt alive while we couldn't move,” he said.

“I felt my heart and brain burning.”

Moving from shelter to shelter

The killing of Duaa inside her tent happened in mid-May, according to Hweihi.

The Palestinian father had been forced to move with her from one shelter into another for months before her death, amid the relentless Israeli bombardment.

Duaa was born a normal child, he told Middle East Eye, but over time, her body weakened.

The doctors told him she had cerebral palsy, and her muscles grew weaker as time went on until she lost her ability to move or communicate.

Since the death of his wife eight years ago, Duaa had become dependent on Hweihi for everything.

“She couldn’t move or speak and depended on me for everything - feeding, giving her water, and caring for her,” he told MEE.

“It was like caring for an infant for 34 years.”

Like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians across Gaza, Hweihi was displaced multiple times over the past year due to ongoing Israeli raids and aerial bombings.

Each time, he had to carry Duaa with him despite his advanced age.

“We were displaced several times and Duaa was with me, along with one of my sons, his wife, and their children,” he said.

The first time he received messages on his phone from the Israeli military, telling him to leave Jabalia to a “safe place”.

The first shelter was a school in the Jabalia refugee camp, but he soon found out schools were not off limits to Israeli bombardment and stormings.

“The school wasn’t safe, they bombed everything there, stormed it, filmed us, interrogated us, detained some people, and then expelled us from there,” Hweihi recalled.

Eventually, he moved to an Unrwa-run school complex called Abu Zeitoun.

“There was also constant shelling around us [there],” he said.

“Every day, something new happened; every day they bombed a new and nearby place or fired shots from quadcopters or invaded the surrounding area. We lived some of the hardest days of our lives there.”

Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza on 7 October 2023, the Israeli military has targeted and stormed dozens of schools, including those run by the UN, which have served as shelters for families forced out of their homes by Israeli forces or for those whose homes were destroyed in the attacks.

Other schools were turned into bases for Israeli military operations after they were raided and cleared of displaced families.

Due to limited space in the remaining schools, many people, like Hweihi and his family, were forced to set up tents in the playgrounds or just outside.

The Hweihi's tent was made from nylon with a zinc roof in the schoolyard, he said.

“We couldn’t find a place in the school’s classrooms, where thousands of other residents of Jabalia were staying after their homes were bombed. Some even came to the schools thinking they would be safer than their homes and neighbourhoods, which were relentlessly bombarded,” Hweihi added.

“We stayed there for nearly four months, and throughout that time, we were starved and had to eat animal food. The attacks didn’t stop, and only God knows what we endured there.”

‘We watched as the flames engulfed it’

In early May, Israel launched its second ground assault on Jabalia, located north of Gaza City, since the start of the war in October 2023.

For 20 days, bombs rained down relentlessly on the densely populated refugee camp as tanks and troops advanced on the ground and laid siege to it.

The intensity of the attacks kept creeping closer and closer to Abu Zeitoun schools, with shrapnel and gunfire intermittently reaching the school’s premises.

But the morning of 15 May brought “another level of horror,” according to Hweihi.

“At around 8 or 9 am, we were sitting together and I was feeding Duaa barley bread,” he recalled.

“Suddenly, out of nowhere, the shooting started. An Israeli sniper fired into the schoolyard, killing a 24-year-old woman, then a young man from the Khalidi family was shot next. We ran as fast as we could, trying to get away from the sniper fire, and took shelter in one of the classrooms.

“I couldn’t bring Duaa with me. I couldn’t carry her as I was running, I had no way to lift her.”

Israeli forces soon stormed the school under heavy gunfire, separating men from women, interrogating individuals, and detaining some young men from the school.

“There was a soldier among them dressed in civilian clothes who went to the tents, poured gasoline on the wood and nylon and then set them on fire. He ignited the tent where my daughter Duaa was lying.

“We all watched as the flames engulfed it, and tanks and soldiers fired everywhere. I couldn't scream; there was no one to talk to. Who could I talk to? The tanks that didn't stop firing?”

The soldiers then continued to destroy the remaining tents and structures in the school.

“After the fire, they bulldozed the rest of the tents, even the walls. It all became one pile of rubble, and then they expelled us from the school,” Hweihi said.

For around 10 days, he was unable to return to the school. When he finally did, it was to search for his daughter’s remains.

“I went back, but nothing was left of her,” he said.

“Not a single trace of her body. I searched through the rubble, but Duaa was gone.”

During the assault on Jabalia, Israeli forces “damaged almost everything,” residents, survivors and local reporters said after the army withdrew in late May.

Entire neighbourhoods were wiped out, most homes were gone; basic infrastructure - like water wells, the main sewage pump, utility poles and telephone lines - were destroyed. The central open market was flattened, two hospitals were raided by Israeli troops, a vital UN clinic serving thousands of people was torched, and a street housing several schools was completely wrecked.

Witnesses said the Jabalia refugee camp was left “unrecognisable” and was no longer suitable for human habitation.

Jabalia is the largest of eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. Before the war, it housed over 116,000 people officially registered with Unrwa. The actual number of people in the camp is likely to be much higher.

Palestinian refugee camps like Jabalia's were established in 1948 to temporarily house families expelled from their homeland by Zionist militias in the war that created Israel, in an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba - or "catastrophe" in English.

With an area of 1.4 sq km, Jabalia is one of the most densely populated Unrwa camps.

Earlier this week, Israeli forces launched another ground and aerial assault on the camp, bombing it relentlessly once again, and forcing tens of thousands of people out of their homes and shelters.

It was destroyed by kHamas.

And they'll say it with a straight face.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240929090 ... cle-821680

Anyways, there's the Jerusalem Post article your article is referring to.

Germany will supply more weapons to Israel soon, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Thursday, after a significant drop in deliveries this year prompted opposition accusations that Berlin deliberately delayed the exports.

"We have not decided not to supply weapons. We have supplied weapons and we will supply weapons," Scholz told parliament at an event to commemorate the victims of the October 7 massacre, countering an accusation from opposition leader Friedrich Merz.

The government had made decisions "that also ensure that there will be further deliveries soon," the chancellor said.

Merz, leader of Germany’s conservative opposition, accused the government of delaying arms exports to Israel, including ammunition and tank spare parts.

Arms exports dropped sharply
Germany's approvals for arms exports to Israel dropped sharply this year, with only 14.5 million euros' worth granted from January to August 21, according to data provided by the Economy Ministry in response to a parliamentary question.

In 2023, Germany approved arms exports to Israel worth 326.5 million euros including military equipment and war weapons, a 10-fold increase from 2022, data from the ministry, which approves export licenses, showed.

Commenting on the fall in exports, the German government has said there is no arms export boycott on Israel, and export permits are issued case-by-case after careful review, taking into account international law, foreign policy and security considerations.

A report released today by U.N. experts accused Israel of war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination for carrying out a “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system.”

The Israeli military continued dismantling Hezbollah leadership, killing two military commanders in airstrikes. Strikes also hit Syria this morning, as Israel expands its campaign across the Middle East.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said its response to Iran's missile attack would be "lethal, precise and, above all, surprising" after President Joe Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The U.N. force in Lebanon accused Israel of repeatedly hitting its positions and injuring two peacekeepers in the country's south. More than 2,000 people have been killed and more than 1.2 million displaced in Lebanon.

The U.S. told the U.N. Security Council last night that Israel must urgently address "catastrophic conditions" in the Gaza Strip. An IDF strike killed at least 26 people sheltering in a school there today, according to Gaza's government, while local health authorities say Israel's yearlong assault has killed at least 42,000 people.

Bracing itself for a retaliatory strike from Israel, Iran has been urging its Arab neighbors not to allow Israel to use their airspace, two diplomats from Gulf nations told NBC News on Friday.

Israel has vowed to respond to last week’s ballistic missile attack by Iran, prompting Tehran to warn countries that helping Israel in any way could potentially escalate into war, one of the diplomats said. Both asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the sensitive issue.

“The Gulf Cooperation Council is not interested in being caught in a crossfire,” one diplomat said. “Our focus has been on de-escalation.”

Many Arab nations such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates host U.S. bases and oil facilities vital to the world economy, and Iran's warning about helping Israel is raising fears in the region that these sites could become targets.

But the second diplomat added that it was unlikely that any Arab nation would agree to allow its airspace to be used by the Israelis for a strike on Iran.

Both diplomats spoke after an intense diplomatic push by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Abbas Araghchi, his foreign minister, to shore up support among their Gulf neighbors and persuade them to use their influence in Washington to temper an Israeli attack.

The timing and nature of Israel’s response remains unclear. On Wednesday, Yoav Gallant, Netanyahu’s defense minister, said Israel’s response would be “deadly, precise and above all surprising.”

President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke this week and “agreed to remain in close contact over the coming days," according to a White House readout of the call.

While some in Israel and beyond are encouraging the country to use this opportunity to launch an ambitious and unprecedented strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Biden has said he would not support such an action.

Brig. Gen. Rasoul Sanaei-Rad, a senior adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was also quoted by the state-run Fars news agency on Wednesday as saying that striking nuclear sites would “cross regional and global red lines.”

Biden has also cautioned Israel against striking oil facilities in Iran, and Gulf states, worried about their own oil sites coming under attack, have been lobbying Washington to prevent such a move.

Helping to fuel those fears, Abu al-Askari, the military spokesman for Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful Shiite paramilitary group based in Iraq, said in a statement on Telegram that “the world will lose 12 million barrels of oil per day” if Iran is targeted. He also threatened to target “American bases, camps and interests in Iraq and the region” in retaliation.

However, Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Israel “ignored Syrian and Iraqi protestations though, and fly through” their airspace. The alternative would be “a very long route around, down the Red Sea and up,” he added.

“It’s difficult to know how much they are trying to get the Iranians second-guessing themselves and tied-up in counter-intelligence knots,” he said, adding that it was generally assessed that a strike on Iran’s deepest nuclear facilities would “require large weapons that can only be dropped from U.S. bombers.”

In Gaza and Lebanon, people were counting the cost of Israeli strikes. At least 22 people were killed and 117 injured in overnight attacks on Beirut, the Lebanese capital, according to the country’s health ministry. NBC News has reached out to the Israel Defense Forces for comment.

In Gaza, Palestinian authorities said at least 28 people had been killed and dozens more wounded in an airstrike on a school-turned-shelter in the city of Deir el-Balah. The IDF said it was being used as a terrorism command center.

In a recent press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi insisted that Arab and Muslim countries will guarantee Israel’s security if Jerusalem agrees to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines, while blasting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to do so.

“The Israeli prime minister came here today and said that Israel is surrounded by those who want to destroy it,” Safadi said at a Friday press conference shortly after Netanyahu finished his speech at the UN General Assembly.

“We’re here — members of the Muslim-Arab committee, mandated by 57 Arab and Muslim countries — and I can tell you very unequivocally, all of us are willing to guarantee the security of Israel in the context of Israel ending the occupation and allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state,” Safadi passionately argued.

Netanyahu “is creating that danger because he simply does not want the two-state solution. If he does not want the two-state solution, can you ask Israeli officials what is their end-game — other than just wars and wars and wars?”

“All of us in the Arab world here, want a peace in which Israel lives in peace and security, accepted, normalized with all Arab countries in the context of ending the occupation, withdrawing from Arab territory, allowing for the emergence of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state on the June 4, 1967 lies with East Jerusalem as its capital,” Safadi continues.

“The amount of damage that this Israeli government has done — 30 years of efforts to convince people that peace is possible, this Israeli government killed it.

Iranian military and energy infrastructure.

There is no indication that Israel will target nuclear facilities or carry out assassinations, but U.S. officials stressed that the Israelis have not made a final decision about how and when to act.

The region has been on edge awaiting Israel's response to an Iranian missile barrage launched on Oct. 1, which Iran said was in response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the assasination of its allies, including Hamas' Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, and Hezbollah's powerful leader, Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut.

Iran's attack caused little damage in Israel.

The U.S. does not know when Israel's response could come but officials said the Israeli military is poised and ready to go at any time once the order is given.

U.S. officials stressed that they have no information to indicate the response will come today but admitted that Israel has not shared a specific timeline with them — and it is not clear Israeli officials have even agreed on one yet.

Israel has shared more information with the U.S. about the retaliation, the officials said, but they withheld many details out of operational security concerns. The U.S. is poised to defend its assets in the region from any immediate counterattack from Iran but is not likely to provide direct military support to the operation.

The US is mulling sending Israel an advanced anti-ballistic missile defense system operated by American troops to protect the country in case of an Iranian reaction to an expected Israeli reprisal attack, an US official said Saturday.

Israel has vowed to respond after Iran lobbed some 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, with the US seeking to coordinate with Jerusalem and temper its retaliation. A weekend report indicated that US officials think Israel has narrowed down its list of possible targets.

With Iran saying it will reply to any retaliatory action in kind, reports in Hebrew-language media over the weekend claimed that Washington was set to deploy Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) air defense batteries to beef up Israel’s ability to fend off ballistic missiles, which Tehran’s proxies have also launched at Israel in recent months.

A US official speaking to The Times of Israel on condition of anonymity confirmed US President Joe Biden’s administration was considering transferring the systems to Israel, but said no decision had been made yet.

The US has a wide range of missile defense systems arrayed across the Middle East and Europe, including Patriot systems. Officials have been discussing for months what types of air defense systems to deploy to the region and where to put them. Any move of a THAAD to Israel would involve the deployment of soldiers to operate the complex system.

According to an April report by the Congressional Research Service, the US Army has seven THAAD batteries. The system is considered complementary to the Patriot, but it can defend a wider area, hitting targets at ranges of 150-200 kilometers (93-124 miles).

Generally, each consists of six truck-mounted launchers, 48 interceptors, radio and radar equipment, and requires 95 soldiers to operate.

Hamas had planned to conduct a 9/11-style attack on Israel that was intended to be far deadlier than the October 7 massacre that took place in 2023, according to a Washington Post exclusive report allegedly based on records found by Israeli officials.

The plans reportedly dated many years before the October 7 attacks and involved knocking down a Tel Aviv skyscraper, along with the use of trains, boats, and chariots, to conduct a devastating attack against Israel.

According to the report, electronic records and papers were recovered by Israeli officials from Hamas command centers and showed the advanced planning that was done. Several of the plans made by the terror group appeared to be "ill-formed and highly impractical," terrorism experts noted to the Post.

Additionally, letters from the terror group to Iranian leaders were also found, and they showed that Hamas had requested their help initiating the attacks, the report said.

Furthermore, the Post said a letter written by Hamas Head Yahya Sinwar in 2021 was found within the documents that appealed to several senior Iranian officials, asking for financial and military support while promising that, with Iran's help, the terror group would be able to destroy Israel within two years.

While the report noted that the documents' authenticity could "not be definitively established," it also stated that the content appeared to be consistent with US and allied intelligence assessments following October 7 regarding Hamas's plans and relations with Iran.

The Post also spoke to Israeli officials who were not involved in collecting the comments and said they "independently assessed that they were genuine."

Satellite images of Israel
The reported findings of the Israeli officials also "included more than 17,000 photographs — from satellite images to photos of Israeli cities and landscapes taken by drone cameras or gleaned from social media postings," the Post said.

Photos were reportedly found of Israeli air base diagrams and images depicting the flight patterns of commercial aircraft that had used the Ben Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv.

A document was found with a plan to destroy three skyscrapers in Tel Aviv: the 70-story Moshe Aviv Tower and the Azrieli Mall complex, which are near a large shopping complex and train station.

Along with the pictures of the plan, the text said, "If this tower is destroyed in one way or another, an unprecedented crisis will occur for the enemy, similar to the crisis of the World Trade Center towers in New York." The text was written in Arabic, according to the Post.

Yet, according to the report, the document noted that the plan to attack the Tel Aviv skyscrapers was not fully formed, and Hamas remained unsure of how to conduct such a strike.

Additional Hamas attack plans
In additional plans found in the documents, Hamas also allegedly aimed to target Israel's railway system and came up with variations of transporting terrorists who held explosives.

The plans also showed a particularly unconventional form of attack that involved using a three-man chariot drawn by horses to conduct attacks on Israel, the Post noted.