Five IDF soldiers were injured last night at the start of the clash with Gaza.

A Golani unit was in the process of destroying the terror tunnel discovered on October 7 that led to the inside of Israeli Kibbutz Ein HaShlosha, when they were injured in an explosion. It is not yet clear if the explosion was from an explosive device or mortar fire.

Reportedly, the soldiers were 100 meters inside Gaza, working on destroying the part of the terror tunnel on the Gaza side of the fence.

The soldiers were evacuated to Soroka hospital in Be’er Sheva by helicopter. At least one was brought in, in serious condition, one in moderate, and the rest with lighter injuries.

The soldier who was seriously injured is Achiyah Klein (Achiyah ben Nira) of Kfar Etzion. Klein is an officer in the Yahalam combat engineering unit.

The IDF responded with tank fire, helicopter fire, and reportedly navy fire at Khan Yunis in Gaza.

Four Gazan terrorists were killed in the IDF response.

Recently, the IDF began reducing the forces placed within the Gaza border communities, saying that the situation is now safer along the Gaza border. On Thursday evening the IDF pulled out their last soldier stationed within the communities in Sha’ar HaNegev.

The Mossad gave an assessment this week, that as US pressured talks progress with the Palestinian Authority, Hamas will escalate their terror activities against Israel.

Egypt’s closure of smuggling tunnels between Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula is costing Hamas $230 million in lost revenue a month, a senior official in the terrorist organization said.

The “closure of the tunnels caused heavy losses to the industry, commerce, agriculture, transport and construction sectors of around $230 million monthly,” said Hatem Oweida, Hamas’ deputy economic minister, AFP reported.

Since taking control of Gaza in 2007, Hamas has used the smuggling tunnels to transfer economic goods, as well as weapons and rockets, into the territory. Hamas also generates a lot of revenue by taxing goods that pass through the tunnels.

However, Egypt’s military backed government has accused Hamas of supporting terrorists in the Sinai and has launched a campaign to destroy the tunnels. Last month, Egypt said it shut down more than 130 tunnels between Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Meanwhile, Israel recently uncovered a massive tunnel stretching from southern Gaza to Israel’s Eshkol region. Israel fears that other tunnels could exist and be used to kidnap soldiers or carry out terrorist attacks inside of Israel.

The Israel Air Force (IAF) attacked two rocket launch pads in northern Gaza on Monday morning, following the launches at Ashkelon this morning.

The IAF said it hit the underground sites, Gazan sources said one person was injured in the attack.

All IAF aircraft returned home safely.

Originally published at Gatestone Institute.

Recently, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas seem to have changed their policy toward the Syrian conflict.

Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority wants to be seen as siding with Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups, most likely out of fear that such support would cost the Palestinians Western sympathy and funding.

Since the beginning of the Syrian crisis, relations between the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad regime and the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have been tense.

Hamas’s public support for the opposition forces led to the expulsion of its leaders from Syria; and the Palestinian Authority’s failure to support publicly the Assad regime resulted in tensions between Damascus and Ramallah.

After losing faith in the Syrian opposition, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are now trying to mend fences with the regime of Syria’s President, Bashar Assad.

The two rival Palestinian parties are hoping that Assad will forgive them for failing to support his regime against the rebels – a move that has resulted, since the beginning of the civil war, in the displacement and death of tens of thousands of Palestinians living in Syria.

More than 200,000 Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes in several refugee camps in Syria, while another 2,000 have been killed in the fighting between the Syrian army and the opposition forces.

The shift in the Palestinian Authority’s stance became evident during Mahmoud Abbas’s recent speech at the United Nations General Assembly.

Referring to the Syrian crisis, Abbas said, “While we condemn the crime of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, we have affirmed our rejection of a military solution and the need to find a peaceful political solution to fulfill the aspirations of the Syrian people.”

The Assad regime did not conceal its satisfaction with Abbas’s comments, especially his opposition to a “military solution.” That Abbas refrained from holding the Assad regime responsible for the use of chemical weapons was also received with a sigh of relief in Damascus.

After Abbas’s speech, Assad agreed to meet with senior PLO official Abbas Zaki, who relayed to him a letter from the Palestinian Authority president.

The Syrian news agency Sana quoted the PLO envoy as telling Assad that the Palestinians support Syria in the face of “aggression.” This statement means that the PLO has decided to support Assad against the various opposition groups fighting against his regime.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s efforts to patch up its differences with the Assad regime have thus far been less successful.

In the context of these efforts, Hamas leaders and spokesmen have stopped their rhetorical attacks on the Assad regime. In addition, Hamas has been working hard to distance itself from the Syrian “rebels,” particularly those affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

In a speech in Gaza City last weekend, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh assured Syria and other Arab countries that his movement does not meddle in their internal affairs. “We never sided with [Arab] country against the other,” Haniyeh declared. “We are keen on a unified Arab and Islamic position toward the Palestinian cause.”

Like Abbas, Haniyeh also called for a “political solution and national understandings” in solving Arab disputes.

But while a rapprochement between Hamas and the Assad regime would only serve the Islamist movement’s interests and help it rid itself of its growing state of isolation, especially in the aftermath of the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt, the renewal of ties between the Palestinian Authority and Damascus does not bode well for the future of the peace process.

The Assad regime is not going to change its position toward peace with Israel to appease Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. Abbas’s gestures toward Assad will only bring him closer to Iran, Hezbollah and radical Palestinian groups that oppose any peace process with Israel.

Soldiers on routine patrol along the Gaza security fence Monday morning discovered a large bomb that terrorists had planted for detonating when an army vehicle passes.

The soldiers called in sappers who naturalized the bomb.

The army last week discovered two large runnels that were intended by Hamas to use for kidnappings and attacks on Jewish communities near the fence.

The Hamas organization accepted responsibility on Sunday for the digging of the “terror tunnel” exposed by the IDF a week and a half ago in the area between Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha and the Gaza Strip border.

It turns out the Hamas has a “military arm,” which is responsible for doing the bad things, while the “civilian arm” continues to receive donations from the nice folks in Europe. This way they make sure that the money donated to Hamas is only used to feed orphans and widows, all of them 100 percent victims of Israeli genocide.

On Sunday, a spokesman for the bad Hamas, a gentleman nicknamed Abu Ubaida, after a medieval Muslim language scholar (on account of the talking, you get it, right?), told the Hamas radio station in Gaza that the Hamas military force “dug the tunnel and were responsible for it.”

Abu Ubaida stated that the tunnel was dug in an attempt to kidnap an Israeli soldier or civilian, and use them to force Israel to release the remaining thousands of Palestinian prisoners in its jails.

Israel has established many times in the past that not only is it happy to negotiate with terrorist, but that it’s willing to give away the story. The going rate for 1,000 jailed Arabs is one captured Israeli.

In 2011, 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, who were collectively responsible for 569 Israeli deaths, were released in exchange for Gilad Shalit. The campaign to release him (see the girls below painting his portrait on the pavement) reassured Hamas that they don’t need to ever give up anything in negotiations, or recognize, not even on paper, the Jews’ right to live. All they need is to get them a succulent Israeli with good, middle class parents.

It should be noted that the IDF blamed Hamas for the tunnel as soon as it was discovered. It also blamed winter for rain, and summer for those long, hot days in August.

It should also be noted that the tunnel required some 500 tons of cement, which was produced in Israel and provided to the Arabs in Gaza for the explicit purpose of rebuilding their neighborhoods following the 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense.

It appears that the Arabs went ahead and used that precious cement to aggressive ends, rather than to construct their homes. In fact, the IDF estimated that an astounding 20% of Hamas’s annual budget goes into building terror tunnels.

This is astonishing, in light of the fact that they’ve never done anything like that before, and no one in Israel could have imagined this kind of treachery. This is a moral failure on the part of the bad Hams, and we certainly hope the good Hamas will give them a sound rebuke!

The tunnel, incidentally, was 45 feet deep in places, and looks like a mini subway tunnel, complete with a track and a small car that could be used to whisk away the kidnapped soldier, even as his or her parents are being called and urged to start organizing a mass grassroots movement to release a thousand murderers.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated the IDF for the discovery, saying it’s all part of Israel’s new, aggressive security policy, which is the reason why we’ve had the “quietest year in a decade” in Gaza, despite the rise in terrorist activity in recent years.

Of course, it could be that the reason the Arabs have been so quiet is that they’re all underground, digging up tunnels.

It’s interesting to note that the Egyptian Army has found a very effective way of securing its own border with the Gaza Strip: they caved in all the tunnels with bulldozers, then used the same bulldozers to raze a swath of several kilometers worth of buildings, creating a no man’s area where Arabs who dare to enter will be shot.

Could we contract the same Egyptians to fix our Gaza problem?

An astounding 20% of Hamas’s annual budget goes into building terror tunnels, according to an IDF estimation, which is based on numbers published by Hamas in Gaza.

With an annual budget of $700 million, it’s estimated that $100 million goes directly towards building terror tunnels into Israel and the Sinai, said a report in Makor Rishon.

The IDF estimates there are many more terror tunnels leading into Israel, besides the four that were recently found.

It is unknown how much more of their budget then goes into acquiring and building missiles and explosives.

Hamas’s Finance Minister complained that Hamas has lost $460 million since June, as a result of Egypt blowing up 90% of Hamas’s tunnels in the Sinai.

Hamas says they need their terror tunnels to kidnap Israelis, to help free terrorists captured by Israel who were trying to kill Israelis.

Just imagine if they had instead put that money towards new schools, medical centers, or social programs to improve their country.

In the supplemental prayer of The Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement, we say these words almost mechanically, theoretically, because this is the text. But in Syria this is reality. The regime’s war against the citizens’ demonstrations, which began two years and seven months ago, has become a dirty, despicable and accursed war, where everyone is fighting everyone else. People from both sides have lost the likeness of man, thrown human values to the winds, lost any semblance of humanity, and have become predatory animals, (“and who by a wild beast”).

Assad’s army has besieged the eastern neighborhoods of Damascus because they serve as a corridor of passage to the capitol for the jihadists who come from Jordan and Iraq. In these neighborhoods in recent weeks, tens of thousands of people have been besieged, cut off from all sources of life: food, water, electricity, and from Asad’s point of view they might as well all die from starvation. These were the neighborhoods that suffered the great attack of chemical weapons on the 21st of August in which approximately 1500 people were killed, men, women and children. As a result of the hunger, a group of Muslim religious arbiters issued a ruling that allows the residents of these neighborhoods to eat cats, dogs and donkeys, in order to survive the siege and the starvation.

There are reports about places like Mu’adhamiyat al-Sham where there have been many cases of death by starvation because of the siege imposed on these places, in addition to cases when injured people have died because they did not receive treatment in time. In addition, there are places where diseases like cholera are rampant, which are caused by spoiled food, contamination of water and the environment, and from pests such as mice, rats, and snakes that multiply alarmingly in ghost towns and ruins of cities like Homs, Hama and Idlib.

Approximately seven million Syrians are destitute refugees in neighboring countries and within Syria. The approaching winter threatens to pose great harm to their health and their lives, as if the misery that people – if it is possible to call them people – have caused them was not bad enough. Because of the distress and poverty, the refugees do anything they can in order to live: the men work for pennies, and many women are forced to do unethical things in order to earn a piece of bread. Families sell their daughters in forced marriages, to get a handful of dinars and reduce the number of mouths that they must feed.

Asad’s army systematically refuses humanitarian aid organizations to operate in the besieged cities, claiming concern that the lives of the volunteers will be endangered by fire from the opposition. But soldiers of the opposition to the regime are not guiltless either: they fight with each other over ideological differences, mainly regarding the future of Syria: will it be a civil state or an Islamic state. In the city of Aleppo “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” is in control and the city is run by an Islamic court that imposes Islamic Shari’a by force of arm, whip and sword. Lately several tribes that live around Aleppo have announced that they have joined “The Islamic State” organization, in order to shelter in the shadow of the dominant force, and stay out of trouble.

The fact that children are present in the battle areas causes them severe emotional damage because of the terrible sights that they are exposed to. Children join the battle and take an active part in killing anyone who is thought to be an enemy. Asad’s militias, the “Shabiha”, are constantly on the lookout for the families of soldiers and officers who have deserted the army so that they can kill the men and abuse the women. In many cases they document and photograph this abuse to show it to those who are still serving, to discourage them from deserting.

This past month several dozens of jihad organizations operating in Syria came to the conclusion that the disagreements among them harm their fighting cause and strengthen Asad. This conclusion led dozens of organizations to put aside their differences and unify under an organizational umbrella by the name of “Jaysh al-Islam” – “The Army of Islam”. The other large organization – “The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” – is considering joining the “Army of Islam”, and it may be that “Jabhat al-Nusra”, which blessed the consolidation with “The Army of Islam”, will also join in the future.