Hamas aimed to provoke a wider war with the October 7 terrorist attacks, a report said.

Analysts told The Washington Post the militant group planned even more extensive strikes.

Israel's response to the October 7 attacks has prompted concern the violence could spread.

Hamas militants had prepared for a "second phase" of terrorist attacks in Israel in the hope of provoking a wider conflict in the Middle East, The Washington Post reported.

The Post, citing more than a dozen current and former intelligence and security officials from four Western and Middle Eastern countries, said militants had carried enough provisions and ammunition to last them several days.

Some also carried documents that included details of how to attack deeper insider Israel, according to the report. Hamas militants wanted to reach into major Israeli cities and had plans for an incursion into the West Bank.

IDF troops managed to find a cache of weapons, ammunition, and explosives in a kindergarten in Gaza's Beit Hanoun, the IDF Spokesperson's Unit announced Saturday night as the ongoing war with Hamas continues.

The discovery was made by the 551st Brigade, a group of reservist commandos and paratroopers who had been carrying out operations against Hamas in the area.

Photos and footage of the weapons were shared by the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, as well as footage of the brigade's operations in the Gaza Strip.

The IDF eliminated Ahmed Siam, a company commander of Hamas's Naser Radwan Company, the terrorist responsible for holding approximately 1,000 Gazan residents hostage in Gaza's Rantisi Hospital preventing them from evacuating south to safety, the IDF said on Saturday.

The assassination succeeded with the efforts of both the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency). Ground and air troops participated in the operation.

Siam was struck while hiding in a school

IDF aircraft struck Siam two days ago, the IDF spokesperson said. He was killed while hiding in the "al Buraq" school, where additional terrorists under this command were also hiding and were killed.

“Clueless” protesters have invited ridicule of pro-Palestine marches after admitting that they did not know whether Hamas attacked Israel.

Two young activists, who have not been identified, were interviewed about the terrorist assault on Israel on Oct 7 as they joined a demonstration in London last Saturday.

But they appeared to have little knowledge of what exactly they were protesting about, with one admitting they needed to be “more clued up”.

In a clip shared online, an interviewer from the Campaign Against Antisemitism asks the pair: “When Hamas invaded Israel on 7th October, what was your initial reaction to that?”

One replies: “I don’t believe they did, did they? Hamas?”

The other responds nervously: “I think so... honestly I think I need to be a bit more clued up on everything that’s going on, so I feel like I’m not really qualified to answer that too well.”

The first activist then adds: “I mean, I’m not sure if I’ve seen anything that shows that that’s actually happened or factually correct.”

In rare acts of defiance, Gazans hurled rocks at Hamas police who tried to jump a queue for water, and openly insulted Hamas officials, witnesses said.

The clashes suggest that Hamas’s authoritarian rule is beginning to crumble, and that locals hold it at least partly to blame for the humanitarian crisis brought about by the Israeli invasion.

--snip--

Over the past few nights in Gaza City, hundreds of residents at one UN shelter decried Hamas each time the group fired salvoes of rockets overhead towards Israel.They said they wanted the war to end, according to a witness sheltering there with his family.

During a televised press conference on Tuesday, a young man with a bandaged wrist pushed his way through the crowd to disrupt a speech by Iyad Bozum, a spokesman for the Hamas-run interior ministry.

False information is being spread, and quickly, in part because the media and UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, parrot Hamas lies and distortions, a Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing is told.

"We are witnessing in real time Hamas carrying out their covenant from 1988, which states, 'Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it just as it obliterated others before it,'" Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said at a House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing about U.S. support for Israel.

Assistant Secretary of State Barbara A. Leaf and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Dana Stroul provided expert testimony to the committee.

--snip--

"Hamas lies. Hamas and the Palestinians lie"
Misinformation is spreading so fast partly because the media and UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, "parrot" Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry statistics, Mast said, which ultimately leads to misinformation responsible for anti-Semitic attacks across the United States.
When Mast asked Leaf why combatants are not included in the Gaza Health Ministry's body count, she told him it was because the ministry includes dead Hamas terrorists in its civilian casualty reports.

Police announced on Friday they had arrested a Netanya resident on suspicion of inciting a riot due to a post online.

The post led to a large crowd gathering outside the student dormitories in Netanya and demanding the Arab students leave.

The post titled "Only Arabs Possess Terror" was cited by police as the cause of unrest at student dormitories in the city.

Officers from the Netanya police station have arrested the suspect for questioning for attempted rioting, along with obstructing a police officer and attempting to cause damage to a building in the city.

The suspect was detained and sent to the police station for questioning.

As Israel is pressured to agree to pause in fighting, top officials in terror group laud ‘great act’ of Oct. 7 and say they never intended to ‘improve the situation in Gaza’

The goal of Hamas’s October 7 massacres in southern Israel was to “change the entire equation,” bring permanent war to Israel’s borders and renew attention to the Palestinian cause, a senior member of the terror group’s politburo in Qatar said.

“What could change the equation was a great act, and without a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big,” Khalil al-Hayya told The New York Times in an interview published Wednesday. “We had to tell people that the Palestinian cause would not die.”

--snip--

“We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm,” Al-Hayya said, confirming that he considered the attacks a success.

While world leaders have been pushing for Israel to agree to a ceasefire in its war against the Gaza terror group, Al-Hayya and other Hamas members dismissed the idea that they want to govern Gaza and restore a sense of calm, instead expressing support for endless conflict.

“I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Hamas media consultant Taher El-Nounou told The Times.

“Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” al-Hayya added. “Hamas, the Qassam [Brigades, its armed wing] and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The Gaza war has dramatically increased the sense of solidarity with Israel among its 21% Arab minority, who often identify as Palestinian and have long complained of discrimination by the state, a poll published on Friday found.

Asked if they feel part of the country, 70% of Arab citizens polled said "yes", up from 48% in June, the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) said, describing it as the highest finding for the sector since it began such surveys 20 years ago.

However, just 27% of Arab respondents said they felt optimistic about Israel's future, compared to 72% of Jews.

Among Israel's Jewish majority, 94% feel part of the country, the IDI said, a peak last matched in 2003, when the country was at the height of military operation against Palestinian militants in the occupied West Bank.

Israel went to war in Gaza following an Oct 7 cross-border onslaught by Hamas gunmen in which some 1,400 of its civilians and soldiers were killed, among them Arab citizens. More than 10,000 Palestinian in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces since.

The Arab minority, who are predominantly Muslim, are descended from Palestinian Arabs who remained in Israel when it was founded in the 1948 war in what had been British-ruled Palestine. Hundreds of thousands of their kinsmen fled or were expelled.

Asked if, given an alternative Western citizenship, they would leave Israel, 80.5% of Jewish respondents said they would stay, as did 59% of Arab respondents, the IDI poll found.