Hamas…Israel Conflict Day 338….Iran using Western Criminal gangs

• A top Israeli intelligence commander has announced his resignation, the Israeli military said on Thursday. The commander, Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, leader of Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, notified the military of his plans and will leave his post “in the near future,” the military said in a statement. The 8200 division was long seen as a pillar of a vaunted Israeli intelligence apparatus, but its reputation suffered after the Hamas-led attack last year. The New York Times reported in November that the 8200 division failed to detect the attack in part because it had stopped eavesdropping on the hand-held radios of Hamas militants in Gaza, seeing it as a waste of effort.

• The Israeli military wrapped up a three-day incursion into Tulkarm, in the occupied West Bank, that Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency, said killed five people, destroyed several homes, tore up roads and prevented ambulances from reaching the injured. The latest operation came just a week after Israeli forces concluded one of the most extensive raids on the West Bank in decades, which killed 36 people, including eight children, according to the United Nations. The Israeli military has said the raids resulted in the death or capture of a number of armed militants, including some who had carried out attacks against Israelis, but it has not addressed civilian casualties.

• Israel revoked the accreditation of Al Jazeera journalists on Thursday, four months after the government’s decision to shut down the pan-Arab satellite network’s operations there and block its broadcasts. Nitzan Chen, the director of the government press office, said in a statement that the network “disseminates false content” that could “jeopardize state security.” Al Jazeera has strongly rejected those claims, calling them “slanderous and deceptive,” and said it would pursue legal action against the state.

• Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, met with Lebanese officials in Beirut, where he renewed calls for a cease-fire in Gaza and an end to the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Mr. Borrell said that the region had so far “avoided the worst” but that “the threat remains” of a full-scale war along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Israel and Lebanon have carried out tit-for-tat strikes over the past year, including a major round of aerial attacks last month.

• One of two aircraft carrier strike groups the United States had kept in the Middle East over the past few weeks to head off a retaliatory attack from Iran on Israel has now left the region, the Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, said. Last month, the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier was dispatched from the Sulu Sea near the Philippines to the Gulf of Oman, where the Theodore Roosevelt carrier group was already operating. At the time, General Ryder said the move was intended to send a message of deterrence to Iran and avert a wider regional war. On Thursday, General Ryder said that even though the Roosevelt’s strike group has now departed from Middle Eastern waters, the United States continues to take Iran’s threat of retaliation for the assassination of a top Hamas leader “very seriously.”….

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