Israel intercepts missile fired from Yemen
The Israeli military said it had intercepted a missile launched from Yemen following the activation of air raid sirens in multiple regions across the country.
The launch from Yemen follows an Israeli military attack on Houthi targets in Yemen's Hodeidah port on Monday in its latest assault on the Iran-backed militants, who have been striking ships bound for Israel and launching missiles against it.
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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Plans to take Gaza City are met with defiance from war-weary Palestinians and anger by many Israelis
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel's decision to take over Gaza City was met with resignation and defiance by Palestinians who have survived two years of war and repeated raids. Many Israelis responded with fear and anger, worried it could be a death sentence for hostages held in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Friday that Israel would intensify its 22-month war with Hamas by taking over Gaza City, large parts of which have been destroyed by past bombardment and ground incursions. A major ground operation is almost sure to cause more mass displacement and worsen an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis. 'What does (Israel) want from us? ... There is nothing here to occupy,' said a woman in Gaza City who identified herself as Umm Youssef. 'There is no life here. I have to walk every day for more than 15 minutes to get drinking water." Ruby Chen, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen whose son, Itay, is a hostage held in Gaza, told The Associated Press that the decision puts the remaining hostages in danger. 'What is the plan now that is different from the last 22 months?' he said. Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister and harsh critic of Netanyahu, told the AP 'there's not any objective that can be achieved that's worth the cost of the lives of the hostages, the soldiers' and civilians, echoing concerns expressed by many former top security officials in Israel. 'I will die here' Netanyahu says military pressure is key to achieving Israel's war goals of returning all the hostages and destroying Hamas. On Thursday, he told Fox News that Israel intends to eventually take over all of Gaza and hand it over to a friendly Arab civilian administration. But Hamas has survived nearly two years of war and several large-scale ground operations, including in Gaza City. In a statement, the militant group said the people of Gaza would 'remain defiant against occupation' and warned Israel that the incursion 'will not be a walk in the park.' Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled Gaza City in the opening weeks of the war, the first of several mass displacements. Many returned during a ceasefire earlier this year. Now, residents say they are too busy searching for food and trying to survive amid the city's bombed-out buildings and tent camps to think about another exodus. 'I have no intention to leave my home, I will die here," said Kamel Abu Nahel from the city's urban Shati refugee camp. Israel already controls and has largely destroyed around 75% of the Gaza Strip, with most of its population of some 2 million Palestinians now sheltering in Gaza City, the central city of Deir al-Balah and the sprawling displacement camps in the Muwasi area along the coast. The offensive has killed over 61,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters or civilians. It says women and children make up around half the dead. The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The United Nations and other experts consider its figures to be the most reliable estimate of casualties, while Israel disputes them. Ismail Zaydah said he and his family had remained in Gaza City throughout the war. 'This is our land, there is no other place for us to go,' he said. 'We are not surrendering ... We were born here, and here we die." 'This madman called Netanyahu' Hamas-led militants abducted 251 people in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack that started the war and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Though most of the hostages have been released in ceasefires or other deals, 50 are still in Gaza, less than half of them believed by Israel to be alive. Relatives of many of the hostages and their supporters have repeatedly protested against the continuation of the war, demanding that Israel reach a ceasefire with Hamas that would include the return of their loved ones. The long-running talks broke down last month. 'Somebody's got to stop this madman called Netanyahu,' said Yehuda Cohen, whose son Nimrod is held hostage. He said faith in the United States to help is also dwindling. 'I lost hope with Donald Trump ... he's letting Netanyahu just do whatever he likes,' he said. But other Israelis voiced support for the decision. 'They need to go after Hamas,' said Susan Makin, a Tel Aviv resident. 'Why are they not asking why Hamas has not given back the hostages and put (down) their arms?' The agony around the plight of the hostages has worsened in recent days as Palestinians militants have released videos showing two of the captives emaciated and pleading for their lives. Families fear their loved ones, who may be held in other parts of Gaza, are running out time. Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli general and chairman of Israel's Defense and Security Forum, said there are a few hostages in Gaza City and the army will have to decide how to manage the situation. He said they might be able to surround the hostages and negotiate directly with their captors or leave those areas untouched. Under pressure, Hamas might decide to release the captives, he said. That strategy carries great risk. Last year, Israeli forces recovered the bodies of six hostages who were killed by their captors when troops approached the tunnel where they were being held. ___ Shurafa reported from Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip. Associated Press reporter Shlomo Mor in Tel Aviv contributed. ___ Follow AP's war coverage at
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
William H. Webster, only person to lead both FBI and CIA, dies at 101
William H. Webster, the former FBI and CIA director, has died at the age of 101, his family announced Friday. Webster led the FBI from 1978 to 1987 and the CIA from 1987 to 1991, making him the only person to head the nation's top law enforcement agency and its main intelligence agency. 'We are proud of the extraordinary man we had in our lives who spent a lifetime fighting to protect his country and its precious rule of law,' his family said in a statement. Before his time leading agencies in Washington, he served as a federal prosecutor and later spent about eight years as a federal judge. He also served in the US Navy during World War II and the Korean War. Former President Jimmy Carter tapped Webster, a Republican, for a 10-year term as head of the FBI as the agency attempted to boost a reputation that had been tarnished by revelations of domestic spying, internal corruption and other abuses of power. William H. Webster has died at the age of 101. AP Webster was later selected by President Ronald Reagan to lead the CIA, replacing director William J. Casey, who had been criticized for being too political, ignoring Congress and contributing to the arms-for-hostages scandal known as Iran-Contra. 'Every director of the CIA or the FBI should be prepared to resign in the event that he is asked to do something that he knows is wrong,' Webster once said. In 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission chose Webster to lead a board created by Congress to oversee the accounting profession in response to scandals involving Enron and other corporations. The FBI said it sends its prayers and condolences to Webster's family after learning of his passing. Webster was congratulated by President Jimmy Carter after being sworn in as new director of the FBI in Washington, Feb. 23, 1978. AP 'He was a dedicated public servant who spent over 60 years in service to our country, including in the US Navy, as a federal judge, director of the CIA, and his term as our Director from 1978-1987,' the agency said in a statement. 'We are grateful for his life and legacy and wish his family, friends, and colleagues peace and comfort during this time.' Former FBI Director Christopher Wray, who departed the agency earlier this year, said he was 'deeply saddened' by Webster's death. 'My heart goes out to his family in this time of loss. His legacy will endure — not only in the institutions he guided, but in the generations of public servants he inspired to carry the torch forward,' Wray said in a statement. Webster is survived by his second wife, Lynda Clugston Webster, and three children from his first marriage and their spouses, seven grandchildren and spouses and 12 great-grandchildren. His first wife, Drusilla Lane, died in the 1980s.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
'Tracking Everyone, All the Time': What Americans Need To Know About Israel's Secret Eavesdropping Program
Nowadays, it seems that the limit to government surveillance is neither the law nor technological capabilities; it's storage space. In the 1990s, the U.S. National Security Agency was "annually converting more than 22 million pounds of secret documents into cheap, soluble slurry" in order to make room for more, according to Body of Secrets by James Bamford. In 2014, the NSA spent $1.5 billion on a massive data center in Utah riddled with electrical problems. But Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA, seems to have figured out a simple workaround for the problem: Contract it out to private industry. A joint investigative report by The Guardian and the Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Call revealed on Wednesday that Unit 8200 has been storing massive amounts of intercepted phone audio on Microsoft's Azure cloud service. Microsoft, which pleaded ignorance of what the Israeli government was using its servers for, is not the only American institution involved in setting up the program. Its architect, who trained under U.S. military instructors, may have created a blueprint for future mass surveillance in other countries. The cloud-powered surveillance program was the brainchild of Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, the former commander of Unit 8200. Sariel spent 2019 at the National Defense University, a U.S. Department of Defense academy for American and foreign national security professionals, The Washington Post reported last year. In 2020, he "returned to Israel brimming with plans," according to the Post, and took command of Unit 8200 from 2021 until last year. One of those plans, this week's reporting revealed, was to work with private cloud providers. Under Sariel's tenure, Unit 8200's ability to retain and process audio data massively increased. The unit has gone from wiretapping tens of thousands of subjects to recording millions of people's calls, according to the report. Unit 8200 officers told The Guardian and +972 that the unofficial mantra of the project was "a million calls per hour." (The combined population of Israel and the Palestinian territories is 14 million.) Leaked files suggest that Unit 8200 had a goal of storing 70 percent of its data on Azure and that the Israeli military already had 11,500 terabytes of data in total stored on an Azure server in the Netherlands by July 2025. That would be the equivalent of 200 million hours of audio, although it's not clear how much of those 11,500 terabytes comes from Unit 8200's phone intercepts. Microsoft confirmed that Unit 8200 was a customer of its data security services but said that it had "no information" about the data stored on its servers. After the report was published, the Israeli military put out a statement claiming that "Microsoft is not and has not been working with the [Israel Defense Forces] on the storage or processing of data." Even before the surveillance revelations, the relationship between Microsoft and the Israeli government was a subject of controversy. Several Microsoft employees have been fired for publicly protesting over the issue. Most recently, engineer Joe Lopez was fired in May 2025 after shouting "Microsoft is killing Palestinians" during CEO Satya Nadella's keynote speech. Beyond the specifics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, the new reporting carries some lessons about the future of surveillance. Monitoring begets more monitoring; governments set up dragnets in response to security threats, then realize how useful the data is for other goals. The cycle used to be limited by data storage capacity. Nowadays, private industry is increasingly willing and able to fulfill governments' appetite for surveillance capacity, though it's also afraid of bad press and legal liability. Sariel became interested in mass surveillance data collection after a 2015 wave of lone-wolf Palestinian attacks that were impossible to predict by conventional investigative techniques. Someone "decides to perpetrate an attack using a kitchen knife to stab a victim, or the family vehicle to run people over," Sariel wrote in 2021 under a pseudonym, which The Guardian exposed as his last year. "Sometimes the person doesn't even know a day before that he or she is going to commit such an attack. In these cases, traditional intelligence agencies are helpless. How can such an attack be predicted or prevented?" Intelligence officers told +972 Magazine that Sariel became obsessed with "tracking everyone, all the time," and "suddenly, the public became our enemy." While some officers insisted that the surveillance dragnet has saved lives, another portrayed it as a machine that constantly creates pretexts for more aggressive action. "These people get entered into the system, and the data on them just keeps growing," an intelligence officer who recently served in the West Bank told +972. "When they need to arrest someone and there isn't a good enough reason to do so, [the surveillance repository] is where they find the excuse. We're now in a situation where almost no one in the [Palestinian] territories is 'clean,' in terms of what intelligence has on them." For all its technical sophistication, Israeli intelligence failed to anticipate the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. (In fact, Israeli leaders' overconfidence in their high-tech defense may have led them to miss signs of an impending war.) Yet those attacks became another reason to expand the data collection, because the army was preparing to take "long-term control" of Gaza, an intelligence officer told +972. Israeli officials were also uncomfortable with putting such sensitive data in the hands of a foreign third party. Documents from the Israeli justice ministry, obtained by +972, warned that cloud services based in other countries could be exposed to legal liability or even be forced to hand over intelligence data. After the war in Gaza began, Microsoft officials warned Israeli counterparts not to use its services for lethal military targeting, a source at Microsoft told The Guardian. If recent history is any indication, U.S. officials will be watching these challenges closely. The Bush administration looked to Israeli precedents for justifying war-on-terror measures legally, and American police have often incorporated trips to Israel into their counterterrorism training. The "start-up nation" may soon become a model for public-private surveillance partnerships as well. The post 'Tracking Everyone, All the Time': What Americans Need To Know About Israel's Secret Eavesdropping Program appeared first on Solve the daily Crossword
