Early Saturday October 7, 2023, Hamas launched "Operation Al-Aqsa Storm" led by Hamas' Military Chief Mohammed Deif. On that same day, Netanyahu confirmed a so-called "State of Readiness For War".

Israel has now officially declared war on Palestine.

Military operations are invariably planned well in advance (See Netanyahu's January 2023 statement below). Was "Operation Al-Aqsa Storm" a "surprise attack"? Did Netanyahu and his vast military and intelligence apparatus (Mossad et al) have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack?

U.S. intelligence say they weren't aware of an impending Hamas attack. Nonsense.

Moscow is deeply concerned at last weekend's surge in violence between Israel and the Palestinian militant movement Hamas, but finds the US approach to the crisis problematic, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

Washington's position is questionable "because they say: stop it all immediately, Israel must win, destroy the terrorists, and that's it," the top diplomat said on Monday.

There were many escalations in this long-running conflict, "and never after the situation calmed down were the necessary efforts to remove the main cause undermining stability in the Middle East undertaken," he added, referring to the fact that Palestinians don't have a nation state.

Russia considers a two-state solution, as outlined in resolutions by the UN Security Council, to be the only viable way towards stability, but neither Israel nor Washington appear committed to it, Lavrov noted. Quashing extremism without creating a viable Palestinian state cannot bring peace, he said.

Egypt warned Israeli officials that Hamas was planning "something big" before the Palestinian militant group launched a major attack at the weekend, an intelligence source in Cairo has told the Associated Press.

The source claimed that despite the warning of trouble brewing in Gaza, Israeli officials instead focused on the West Bank, as most of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government is made up of supporters of West Bank settlers who have demanded a security crackdown in the area.

"We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings," the intelligence source said.

Hamas' surprise 'breakout' of the Gaza Strip 'prison' into multiple settlements across southern Israel has pushed the Ukraine War off the news and divided public opinion like never before. Many are joining the Israeli regime in calling for Gaza to be 'levelled', and Israel is formally 'at war' with the Palestinian statelet.

But could Hamas really have taken the mighty Israeli Defense Forces by complete surprise? Israel's military and hi-tech surveillance capabilities are world-renowned, and Hamas isn't known to commit ISIS-style atrocities. With Israel mobilizing its entire military, apparently to bring a 'final solution' to its 'subhuman Palestinian problem', a major power-play is afoot, one that may eclipse the Ukraine War and inflame the entire Middle East anew.

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A senior leader of the militant group has told Al Jazeera that high-ranking officers are among its detainees...

Hamas militants have reportedly captured so many Israeli soldiers, including high-ranking officers, that the group expects to negotiate a prisoner exchange for all Palestinians held in West Jerusalem's jails.

"We have a big number of Israeli captives, among them senior officers," Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri told Al Jazeera on Saturday. He added that the captives will be used as leverage to force the release of Palestinians incarcerated in Israel:

"As to our prisoners, I say, your freedom is looming large. What we have in hand will see you set free. The longer fighting continues, the higher the number of prisoners will become."

A public radio report indicated that captives were being held in three communities inside Israel and that some of the detainees were missing and had possibly been moved to Gaza. Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israel on Saturday, firing rockets from Gaza and deploying ground forces in several Israeli towns and military bases.

By Sunday evening, over 300 Israelis and over 300 Palestinians have been killed, according to official figures. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin vowed to retaliate, saying:

"Our enemy will pay a price the type of which it has never known. We are in a war, and we will win it."

From its very onset, Israel has constructed a brand for itself, a powerful gimmick that was predicated on two main pillars: Democracy and Stability.

The main target audience for this brand has been powerful Western states that wielded disproportionate political, economic and military powers.

These Western governments, along with their influential mainstream corporate media, did their part, by polishing Israel's image - as the most democratic and most stable - while tarnishing that of their Arab and Palestinian enemies - or anyone else who dared criticize Israel. It mattered little whether Israel was truly a beacon of democracy and stability, because these terms are often conjured up and used to conveniently fit the interest of those in power.

To maintain the charade, Israel's task was fairly straightforward: conveying a facade of democracy at home - even if this democracy is racially-oriented and exclusionist - and providing enough 'stability' to allow foreign companies to trust that their investments in Israel are safe.

Actual, verifiable truth, in these kinds of situations, is hardly relevant. All that matters are slogans and clichés - and enough people in power who are willing to repeat those slogans, and even believe in the clichés.

Over the years, Israel thus emerged as the "only democracy in the Middle East" and an "oasis of freedom and stability" that is protected by "the most moral army in the world", and so on.

But this pseudo-reality can only exist in relative terms; for Israel to be elevated, the Arabs had to be tarnished and demeaned, despite the fact that it was Israel that illegally occupied Arab land and waged repeated wars on Palestinians and other Arab nations.

President Joe Biden went on a winding tangent Friday and appeared to blame the media for polls that show Americans believe the economy is in a "fair" or "poor" state.

A reporter asked Biden after the president's speech on the September jobs report:

"Mr. President, you started your remarks today by saying it was 'good news today' with the economic report. Why do you think most people still don't feel positive or feel good news about the economy?"

Biden responded:

"I think the people of 300-plus thousand people who just got jobs feel better about the economy. And look, I gotta choose my words here. You all are not the happiest people in the world, which you report. And I mean it sincerely. You get more legs when you report something is negative. I don't mean you're picking on me, it's just the nature of things. You turn on the television and there is not a whole lot about 'boy saves dog because he swims in the lake.' It's about 'somebody pushed the dog in the lake.'"

While Biden continues to boast about the economy under his leadership, 61% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, according to July research from LendingClub, a financial services company. Seventy-five percent of U.S. adults think the economy is in a "fair" or "poor" state. About 16% of Americans believe the economy is getting better, while 56% of U.S. adults say the economy is getting worse, according to the YouGov Poll.

Budapest and Warsaw cannot agree to a deal that will force them to accept migrants, the Hungarian leader declared...

The EU legally "raped" Hungary and Poland by forcing through a deal that will compel member states to accept quotas of illegal immigrants, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday. He added that Hungary will not compromise with Brussels on such an arrangement.

Orban told reporters ahead of a meeting on EU leaders in Spain:

"There is no chance to have any kind of compromise and agreement on migration. Politically, it is impossible. Because legally we are, how to say it, we are raped. So if you are raped legally, forced to accept something you don't like, how would you like to have a compromise? It's impossible!"

EU ambassadors agreed on a landmark migration pact on Wednesday. The deal will see illegal immigrants - most of whom land in Italy and Greece after crossing the Mediterranean - transported to other EU countries on a quota basis. While it allows for migrants to be held longer in processing centers at the EU's external borders, it also allows asylum applications to be fast-tracked in times of "crisis."

Hungary and Poland voted against the pact, while Austria, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic abstained.

The coming days are going to be full of western news media slyly reversing the aggressor-defender relationship and reporting as though all the violence began with the Hamas offensive, spontaneously out of nowhere.

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The problem with oppressing a population with maximum force is that at some point they start figuring they've got nothing to lose by fighting back.

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Do I think this latest uprising will end in more positive results than negative for Palestinians? No. Does that mean I'll condemn the Palestinian resistance for fighting back? Also no.

This is because doing so would be nonsensical, for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, because nobody can tell me what the Palestinians should do instead that is both realistic and reasonable. It would be easy for me to sit here in my armchair and say the Palestinians should either maintain the status quo or lie down, relinquish their homes and homeland and accept whatever table scraps they're able to get, but we can see from the Palestinian perspective that that's not reasonable. It would be easy for me to sit in my armchair and argue that Palestinians should just focus on securing a one-state or two-state solution, but we can see from the Israeli political landscape that that's not realistic.

So what else can they do? What reasonable and realistic options do they have? No one can provide me a satisfactory answer.

Documents reveal that tons of Bulgarian weapons were exported to Ukraine via Poland and the Czech Republic in 2021 and 2020. Bulgaria officially denies that Bulgarian weapons were exported to Ukraine, although the use of Bulgarian weapons was well documented on the front line in Ukraine.

Weapons originating from the Balkans are often seen in war zones including in the hands of terrorists in Syria and Yemen. Although local governments have always denied such exports documents prove otherwise.

Weapons from the Balkans have been used for years for illicit arms supplies to war zones around the world. Documents revealed that 350 diplomatic flights carried weapons to terrorists in Syria. Leaked documents also exposed a secret US Special Operations Command unit code named Task Force Smoking Gun. It had been deployed in Croatia since 2017 and tasked with diverting tons of arms and ammunition from Europe to Syria.