Palestine Government
Israel says it killed Iran's military coordinator with Hamas
The IDF said it had killed Izadi in a strike on an apartment in Qom, south of Tehran, in the early hours of Saturday. He had been in charge of the Palestine Corps of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps's (IRGC) Quds Force, responsible for handling ties with the Palestinian armed groups. He was reportedly instrumental in arming and financing Hamas, and had been responsible for military co-ordination between senior IRGC commanders and Hamas leaders, the IDF said. In April 2024, Izadi narrowly survived an Israeli air strike targeting the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria - an attack that killed several high-ranking Quds Force commanders. Israel later on Saturday also claimed to have killed another Quds Force commander, Behnam Shahriyari in a drone strike as he was travelling in a car through western Iran.
Hamas and the media
Throughout the various ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, western news outlets have repeatedly blamed their failure on Hamas. This week, we hear a perspective that rarely features in the coverage – the group's own – on the negotiations and the media narratives that surround them. Ukrainian drone strikes on multiple Russian airfields have further escalated the conflict, as peace talks come up short. After decades of increased connectivity, screen time and addictive algorithms, more and more young people are logging off. The Listening Post's Ryan Kohls looks at the community-based movements reevaluating their relationships with digital technology.
Mapping Controversies Using Artificial Intelligence: An Analysis of the Hamas-Israel Conflict on YouTube
Lopez, Victor Manuel Hernandez, Cuellar, Jaime E.
This article analyzes the Hamas-Israel controversy through 253,925 Spanish-language YouTube comments posted between October 2023 and January 2024, following the October 7 attack that escalated the conflict. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the study combines the analysis of controversies from Science and Technology Studies (STS) with advanced computational methodologies, specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP) using the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model. Using this approach, the comments were automatically classified into seven categories, reflecting pro-Palestinian, pro-Israeli, anti- Palestinian, anti-Israeli positions, among others. The results show a predominance of pro- Palestinian comments, although pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian comments received more "likes." This study also applies the agenda-setting theory to demonstrate how media coverage significantly influences public perception, observing a notable shift in public opinion, transitioning from a pro- Palestinian stance to a more critical position towards Israel. This work highlights the importance of combining social science perspectives with technological tools in the analysis of controversies, presenting a methodological innovation by integrating computational analysis with critical social theories to address complex public opinion phenomena and media narratives.
REVEALED: What Trump's Gaza takeover would look like as he vows to build 'the Riviera of the Middle East'
President Donald Trump's controversially announced plans for the US to'take over and own' Gaza last night. While the proclamation drew criticism for'bringing more suffering to the region,' users on social media have used AI to transform the city into a gentrified metropolis with a large building featuring a'Trump Tower' sign glowing in lights at the city center. The rubble-filled streets were transformed into paved roadways lined with towering skyscrapers and areas where buildings had crumbled featured a green golf course surrounded by resorts. The AI-generated images were met with amusement, but others angered at the insensitivity of the creations and warned how'it would be the biggest blackpill ever if a great Biblical city was paved over.' Trump, who spent his career as a property developer, has long talked up Gaza's coastal location and pleasant climate as a perfect holiday vacation. In his vision, US reconstruction would create thousands of jobs and spare Palestinians the pain and expense of rebuilding once again.
Israel-Hamas war through Telegram, Reddit and Twitter
Antonakaki, Despoina, Ioannidis, Sotiris
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict started on 7 October 2023, have resulted thus far to over 48,000 people killed including more than 17,000 children with a majority from Gaza, more than 30,000 people injured, over 10,000 missing, and over 1 million people displaced, fleeing conflict zones. The infrastructure damage includes the 87\% of housing units, 80\% of public buildings and 60\% of cropland 17 out of 36 hospitals, 68\% of road networks and 87\% of school buildings damaged. This conflict has as well launched an online discussion across various social media platforms. Telegram was no exception due to its encrypted communication and highly involved audience. The current study will cover an analysis of the related discussion in relation to different participants of the conflict and sentiment represented in those discussion. To this end, we prepared a dataset of 125K messages shared on channels in Telegram spanning from 23 October 2025 until today. Additionally, we apply the same analysis in two publicly available datasets from Twitter containing 2001 tweets and from Reddit containing 2M opinions. We apply a volume analysis across the three datasets, entity extraction and then proceed to BERT topic analysis in order to extract common themes or topics. Next, we apply sentiment analysis to analyze the emotional tone of the discussions. Our findings hint at polarized narratives as the hallmark of how political factions and outsiders mold public opinion. We also analyze the sentiment-topic prevalence relationship, detailing the trends that may show manipulation and attempts of propaganda by the involved parties. This will give a better understanding of the online discourse on the Israel-Palestine conflict and contribute to the knowledge on the dynamics of social media communication during geopolitical crises.
Israeli military launches large-scale counterterrorism operation in West Bank city
The Israeli Defense Forces on Sunday released video of Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari crossing into Israeli territory. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a wide-ranging counterterrorism operation in the West Bank city of Jenin on Tuesday. The IDF, Israel Security Authority and Israel Border Police announced the operation in a joint statement, but did not give details. Two people were allegedly killed in an Israeli strike that was part of the operation, France 24 reported, citing the Palestinian Health Ministry. An Israeli military source allegedly told the Times of Israel that the operation began with drone strikes and is expected to last for several days.
Israel kills Hamas commander who led heinous Oct. 7 attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz killed in drone attack: IDF
Aviva Siegel, who was held hostage by Hamas for 51 days, tells'Fox & Friends' about her husband, who is still being held in captivity in Gaza, and recounts the harrowing experiences she witnessed during the terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. A top Hamas commander responsible for the heinous Oct. 7 attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz has been killed by a targeted drone strike, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) announced. Abd al-Hadi Sabah, who led the infiltration into Kibbutz Nir Oz, which ravaged the community near the Gaza border on Oct. 7, was killed on Tuesday local time in the Western Khan Yunis Battalion. The IDF said in a release on social media Tuesday that they conducted the intelligence-based strike alongside the Israeli Security Agency (ISA). The agencies said that Sabah was hiding in a shelter in the designated humanitarian area in Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza.
Drone Captures Moment of Defiance, Which Israel Says Was Sinwar's Last
The Israeli military, which released the video, said it shows the last moments of Mr. Sinwar, an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, before he was killed in Rafah on Wednesday. While the room, the man's clothing and the arm injury broadly match other visual evidence of Mr. Sinwar's death, The Times could not independently verify his identity in the video. In modern warfare, militaries use drones to scope out enemy positions, and often release propaganda videos showing enemy soldiers being killed. On the battlefields in Ukraine, both sides in that conflict have released a steady stream of drone footage showing panicked soldiers moments before their deaths. But here the drone footage shows a solitary figure remarkably close-up. In a war often seen from far away, in large explosions or wide vistas of broken buildings, the moment is remarkably personal.
Hamas admits 'painful, distressing' losses after Israeli video shows terrorist Sinwar moments before his death
Hamas on Friday is admitting to suffering "very painful and distressing" losses following the killing of its leader Yahya Sinwar as the Israeli military has released new drone video capturing the final moments of the terrorist's life. Footage taken of a wounded Sinwar shows him throwing a wooden board at a drone that was surveying damage inside of a building that the Israel Defense Forces targeted in Rafah, according to IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari. Sinwar was later found dead with a gun and nearly 11,000 in his possession, he added. "Yes it's very painful and distressing to lose beloved people, especially extraordinary leaders like ours, but what we are sure of is that we are eventually victorious; this is the outcome for all people who fought for their liberty," senior Hamas official Basem Naim said Friday. "It seems that Israel believes that killing our leaders means the end of our movement and the struggle of the Palestinian people. They can believe what they want, and this is not the first time they said that," he continued.
NLP Case Study on Predicting the Before and After of the Ukraine-Russia and Hamas-Israel Conflicts
Miner, Jordan, Ortega, John E.
We propose a method to predict toxicity and other textual attributes through the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques for two recent events: the Ukraine-Russia and Hamas-Israel conflicts. This article provides a basis for exploration in future conflicts with hopes to mitigate risk through the analysis of social media before and after a conflict begins. Our work compiles several datasets from Twitter and Reddit for both conflicts in a before and after separation with an aim of predicting a future state of social media for avoidance. More specifically, we show that: (1) there is a noticeable difference in social media discussion leading up to and following a conflict and (2) social media discourse on platforms like Twitter and Reddit is useful in identifying future conflicts before they arise. Our results show that through the use of advanced NLP techniques (both supervised and unsupervised) toxicity and other attributes about language before and after a conflict is predictable with a low error of nearly 1.2 percent for both conflicts.