Headline

Israeli Army Admits Failure On Oct 7, Says It Underestimated Hamas

Published

8 months ago

February 28, 2025

An internal Israeli army investigation into Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack released on Thursday acknowledged the military’s “complete failure” to prevent the deadly assault, saying that for years it had underestimated the group’s capabilities.

The attack, which left hundreds of Israelis dead, sparked a devastating war in Gaza, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

“October 7 was a complete failure, the IDF (military) failed in fulfilling its mission to protect Israeli civilians,” a senior Israeli military official said as he briefed reporters about the inquiry’s findings.

“Too many civilians died that day asking themselves in their hearts or out loud, where was the IDF,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity in accordance with military protocols.

In a summary of the report shared with journalists, the military said: “The Israel Defense Forces failed to protect Israeli citizens. The Gaza Division was overrun in the early hours of the war, as terrorists took control and carried out massacres in the communities and roads in the area.”

The military official explained that the army was “overconfident” and had miscalculated Hamas’s military capabilities ahead of the attack.

The inquiry, which includes 77 separate investigations into what transpired in communities, army bases and multiple confrontation points around the Gaza periphery, is in the process of being presented to those directly affected.

This is still only a “slither of the whole process”, the official said. Additional inquiries, including one into what happened at a music festival in the desert, are still to come.

– Among army’s ‘greatest failures’ –

The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures, which include hostages killed in captivity.

Out of 251 people taken hostage that day, 58 are still held in Gaza, including 34 the military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed at least 48,365 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

“This was one of the most horrific events ever to take place in Israel,” the army official said. “It was one of the IDF’s greatest failures.”

The official said the inquiry was carried out over 15 months and focuses on four key areas: military perceptions ahead of October 7; intelligence failures; events the night prior to the attack; and the army’s actions on the day along with its efforts to regain control in the days that followed.

“We did not even imagine such a scenario,” the army official said, noting that Israel’s attention was on threats from Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah.

The official said the army had not maintained “a comprehensive understanding of the enemy’s military capabilities” and that it was “overconfident in its knowledge”.

“We were addicted to precise intel,” a second senior military official said, explaining that despite signs Hamas was preparing to attack, the army was too focused on what it believed was accurate information.

– Three waves of attacks –

The probe found that Hamas’s attack happened in three waves and saw more than 5,000 people enter Israel from Gaza at its height.

“The first wave… included more than 1,000 Nukhba (Hamas’s elite force) terrorists, who infiltrated under the cover of heavy fire,” the summary of the report said.

It said the second wave involved some 2,000 militants while the third saw hundreds more militants join the incursion, along with several thousand civilians.

“In total, approximately 5,000 terrorists infiltrated Israeli territory during the attack,” the report said. Hamas has maintained that hundreds of its fighters had carried out the attack.

The official said the first few hours of the attack were critical and saw the most killings and abductions.

It was then that Hamas’s elite unit knocked out the military’s communications system and its command and control centres, creating chaos as the army struggled to regain control.

Responding to the inquiry on Thursday, Israel’s armed forces chief said he took full responsibility for failing to prevent the Hamas attack.

“The responsibility is mine. I was the commander of the army on October 7, and I also bear the full responsibility for all of you,” Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, who announced his resignation last month, said in a video statement.

In addition to Halevi, the head of the army’s southern command Major General Yaron Finkelman, announced his resignation.

Military intelligence chief Major General Aharon Haliva stepped down in August.

Headline

UK Is A Home, Not Hotel, Kemi Badenoch Tells Immigrants, Starmer’s Govt

Published

2 days ago

October 23, 2025

Editor

UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has slammed Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government over its immigration policy, declaring that Britain is “a home, not a hotel.”

Badenoch accused Labour of weakening the country’s borders and enabling mass automatic citizenship.

In a 1:11-minute video posted on her official X account on Friday, Badenoch claimed Labour’s proposed reforms could allow up to two million immigrants to automatically qualify for British citizenship starting next year.

“From next year, two million immigrants can automatically claim British citizenship. Two million people! That’s nearly twice the population of Birmingham. That’s massive,” Badenoch said in the video.

Badenoch noted that the Conservative Party has introduced a deportation bill to bring immigration down.

NDLEA intercepts drugs hidden in snails, others meant for UK, US, DRC
Among the measures she endorsed in the video were deporting all foreign criminals, mandatory age checks, no more pretending to be kids, tougher visa rules and salary thresholds, disapplying the Human Rights Act to immigration cases, and no more abusing human rights laws to judge deportations. Make asylum support repayable, and no permanent right to stay in the UK if you’ve relied on benefits.

“Until that’s law, we won’t fix this. Labour should adopt it now. It’s time to get tough. That’s what the Conservatives’ Deportation Bill delivers, and we’re going to go further. Our country is a home, not a hotel. And if we don’t defend it, no one else will.”

In the caption that came with the video, she tweeted, “Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.

“Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak; it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation Bill.”

Headline

King Charles To Pray With Pope Leo In Historic Vatican Visit

Published

2 days ago

October 23, 2025

Editor

King Charles III will on Thursday meet Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican and make history as the first head of the Church of England to pray publicly with the pontiff for five centuries.

The 76-year-old monarch, who is the supreme governor of the Church of England, arrived in Rome on Wednesday evening with his wife, Queen Camilla, for what Buckingham Palace described as a “historic” state visit.

It will be Charles’s first meeting with Leo since the US-born pope took over as head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in May, following the death of Pope Francis.

The royals will arrive at the Apostolic Palace at 10.45am (0845 GMT) for private talks with the pope.

The king and queen will then join an ecumenical service at midday (1000 GMT) in the Sistine Chapel led by Pope Leo and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, currently the senior cleric of the Church of England.

Broadcast live by Vatican media, it will be the first time a reigning English or British monarch has prayed publicly with a pope since English king Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534.

Triggered by the pope’s refusal to annul the king’s marriage so he could marry another woman, the schism made the monarch head of the separate Church of England.

Thursday’s service, held beneath Michelangelo’s spectacular ceiling frescoes, will be centred on conservation and protecting the environment, a cause championed by Charles.

It will bring together Catholic and Anglican traditions, with the choir from the Sistine Chapel joined by that from Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences.

– Schism –

The religious break between London and Rome remains, even if there has been a significant rapprochement in recent decades.

In 1961, the late Queen Elizabeth II, Charles’s mother, became the first British monarch to visit the Holy See since the split.

The law was changed in 2013 so that marrying a Catholic would no longer disqualify someone from becoming monarch — although they still have to be a Protestant themselves.

The rapprochement is important because “Anglicanism was born in reaction to the Catholic Church, and therefore in opposition,” said Hyacinthe Destivelle, a French priest and member of the Vatican’s dicastery (department) for promoting Christian unity.

This is no longer the case, despite “theological differences in recent decades”, he told AFP.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England — the mother church of the world’s 85-million-strong Anglican community — ordains women and allows priests to marry.

Sarah Mullally was recently named the first female archbishop of Canterbury, the Church’s top cleric, although she has yet to officially take up her post.

– Royal Confrater –

Charles and Queen Camilla are also set to take part in a service at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, one of four major papal basilicas, which has historic links with the English crown.

The king will be made a “Royal Confrater” of the basilica and presented with a specially designed seat for use by him and future British monarchs.

Charles has visited the Vatican several times and met privately with Pope Francis on April 9, just days before the pontiff’s death.

The king sent his son and heir, William, to the funeral and his brother, Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, to Leo’s inauguration mass.

The visit comes as the Catholic Church celebrates the Jubilee, a year-long event held every 25 years, which has drawn millions of pilgrims to the Vatican.

It also comes at a delicate time for Charles, following new revelations about his brother Prince Andrew, who is mired in a scandal surrounding late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Andrew announced on Friday that he would relinquish his title as Duke of York, reportedly under pressure from Charles. He had already stepped back from royal duties in 2019.

AFP

Headline

One Dies As Woman Trying To Kill Cockroach Sets House On Fire

Published

2 days ago

October 23, 2025

Editor

South Korean police have stated that a woman in her 20s set her apartment building on fire while trying to kill a cockroach with an improvised flamethrower.

Local media reports that the woman attempted to burn the insect using a lighter and a flammable spray, saying she had used the same method before. However, items in her home caught fire on Monday, spreading to other parts of the building.

Police in the northern city of Osan said they will seek an arrest warrant for the woman, who could be charged with accidentally starting a fire and causing death by negligence.

According to the BBC, one of the woman’s neighbours, a Chinese national in her 30s, died while trying to escape the blaze. The victim lived on the fifth floor of the building with her husband and their two-month-old baby.

When the fire broke out, the couple opened their window and called for help. They handed their baby to a neighbour on the adjacent block before attempting to escape. The husband managed to climb over, but the woman fell from the window. She was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead hours later.

Police said they believed the couple tried escaping through the window because thick smoke from the fire had blocked the stairway.

The building houses commercial shops on the first floor and 32 residential units from the second to fifth floors. Eight other residents also suffered from smoke inhalation.

Using blowtorches or homemade flamethrowers to kill cockroaches has become a trend on social media. In 2018, an Australian man set fire to his kitchen while attempting to exterminate cockroaches with a similar device.