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Where are all the Covid vaccine Post-Authorisation Safety Studies (PASS) which were one of the conditions of authorisation of the Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna Covid vaccines?

Most people will not have heard of PASS studies, but as the name suggests they are extremely important to monitoring medicine safety. Pharmaceutical companies are almost always required to do them for any new medicine.

The Covid vaccine PASS studies are using real data from the NHS and other national healthcare systems to anonymously match recorded vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals by age, gender and Covid infection status. This allows detailed investigation of the relative incidence of side-effects between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.

So PASS studies are far more useful than the Yellow Card system, which just compares the frequency of (passively) reported Covid vaccine side-effects to other medicines, and far more useful that the ONS Covid vaccine safety analysis which founders (among other things) on the ‘denominator problem’: not knowing the number of unvaccinated people. The Covid vaccine PASS studies will be really informative about Covid vaccine safety.

The EMA approved the protocols for doing those PASS studies in 2021: Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and the MHRA approved the use of NHS data in those studies (see also here for Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna).

Each company set out its timetable for submitting interim progress reports prior to its final report. Using the EMA links above, I counted 13 interim progress reports which should have been published by now.

I consider myself a bit of Google sleuth but I have only managed to find two: AstraZeneca’s ‘Interim Report 1’ and one Pfizer ‘Progress Report‘ which does not contain any results.

So let’s look at AstraZeneca’s ‘Interim Report 1’ dated April 21st 2022, which runs to 292 pages. You can find the U.K. results in Table 11.1, starting on page 128. My observation is that the rate of Adverse Effects of Special Interest (AESI) per 10,000 people is almost always higher in the vaccinated, sometimes significantly. But let’s just go with the report’s core conclusion (page 106):

The largest numerical differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated subjects were observed for the incidence of TTS, thrombocytopaenia with bleeding, anaphylaxis and stress cardiomyopathy.

To be scrupulously fair, that statement came with some caveats: “differences were not consistent across all data sources”, and the results “should be interpreted with caution given the short study period included in this first data extraction and the lack of standardisation or adjustment for potential confounders and potential differences in the baseline characteristics of the study cohorts, which is planned for future analyses”.

Fair enough. So what about AstraZeneca’s “future analyses”? Where is ‘Interim Report 2’, which was due January 2023? Where is its ‘Progress Report’, due April 2023, and its Feasibility Report, due June 2023? Not a sniff of any of them.

And where are any of the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccine PASS studies? No sign of them either. So much for transparency and informed consent.

I have an FOI outstanding with the MHRA asking them to send me the missing PASS reports and provide updated delivery dates for the ‘not due yet’ ones. While we wait for MHRA to reply, here are two obvious observations:

It’s not just MHRA which has failed to publish them; the EMA and FDA have also not published them.
If the missing reports confirmed that the Covid vaccines were safe, you’d bet your bottom dollar they’d have published them and be shouting them from the rooftops.
I could be wrong and they are lurking somewhere on the web, so if you find them, do let me know. But if I’m right…

Read More: Vaccine Companies Were Required to Publish Numerous Post-Authorisation Safety Studies

Israel has issued what appears to be a final ultimatum to Palestinians who are still living in the northern Gaza Strip to leave – as it delivered its heaviest hint yet that a long-threatened ground invasion is imminent.

Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari has issued what he labelled an ‘urgent military advisory’ video message, warning Gazans that the military was set to ‘neutralise’ Hamas with ‘precision and intensity’.

Since this announcement, Israel has now warned civilians that the Gaza City region is a ‘battlefield’. In leaflets dropped by fighter jets, the army said: ‘Shelters in northern Gaza and Gaza governorate are not safe.’

This comes as Egypt say that ‘Israeli obstacles’ are impeding the delivery of aid to the Palestinian Gaza Strip. ‘It is unfortunate that the process of transporting aid to the Gaza Strip faces major logistical problems imposed by the Israeli side,’ an Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement.

Northern Gaza was subjected to some of the heaviest bombardment yet carried out by the IDF overnight on Friday as some 150 ‘underground targets’ were struck by jets and shelling, destroying hundreds of buildings.

The Gazan death toll, since Israel’s retaliation began following the October 7 attacks conducted by Hamas terrorists, now stands at 7,703, including over 3,000 children, according to Palestinian health officials.

Some 400,000 Palestinians are believed to remain in the north of the occupied territory despite repeated requests to evacuate; around 1.1 million people were believed to be there before the first warnings were issued earlier this month.

In the video message, IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Hagari said: ‘We urge all residents of Northern Gaza and Gaza City to temporarily relocate south.

‘This is a temporary measure. Moving back to Northern Gaza will be possible once the intense hostilities end.’

The Israeli military spokesperson claimed that Hamas was sheltering weapons and troops in schools, mosques and hospitals, adding: ‘The impending IDF operation is set to neutralise the threat of Hamas with precision and intensity.

‘Humanity remains haunted by the massacre unleashed by Hamas on October 7. We won’t forget that.

‘Your window to act is closing. Move south for your own safety.’

The video was issued across social media. Internet access in Gaza remains sporadic after internet cables and phone networks were severed in the midst of last night’s heavy bombardments.

Leaflets have also been produced by the IDF warning that the Gaza Governorate – referring to the northern administrative area of the strip containing Gaza City – has become a ‘battlefield’ and that the enclave north of the Wadi Gaza valley is ‘unsafe’.

An image of the leaflet, written in Arabic, was shared on X, formerly Twitter, by IDF Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee.

In the meantime, Gazans who have refused to leave the north of the enclave despite Israel’s warnings to do so are living in a state of ‘panic, fear and chaos’ amid the heaviest bombardments yet since October 7 and a total communications blackout.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Saturday he was surprised by Israel’s escalation of the bombardments in Gaza, and repeated a call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire for the delivery of aid.

Read More: Israel’s final plea to Gaza

“Do you have pets?” she asked.

 The Occupational Therapist at the University of Virginia Hospital sounded badly spooked.  After a car crash, I had a sternal fracture, spinal breaks, neck tears, traumatic brain injury, and extensive and deep bruising on my legs and stomach.  But on that day in early March of 2021, my body’s ravages mattered less than the results of the Covid test I took three days before when I entered the Emergency Department.

“Yes, I have two cats,” I said.

“You know you are going to have to quarantine them in the house when you go home,” she said. She asked me about my cats because I had tested positive for Covid with a PCR test. EMTs took me to the emergency room, and a couple of hours later, employees inserted a swab deep into my nostril.

I looked into her masked face behind a plastic shield, strapped to her forehead. We were in a time of widespread panic and paranoia after the country, and the world, shut down in March 2020. TV people, politicians, and bureaucrats forbid singing, church-going, and gathering for Thanksgiving dinner. We were told to be wary of anyone near us.

When the Occupational Therapist said my cats would have to be in a separate room when I went home, I knew at that moment that I had to get out of there as soon as possible. This was frightening and beyond me. It had become so bizarre that I even feared that they may not let me leave.

“Do you live alone?” she asked. Because I “had” Covid, I was going to have to isolate from people for several days after I left the hospital, she said. According to this specialist, I wasn’t supposed to be near people; I wasn’t supposed to be near pets. In what appeared to be full Hazmat gear, she had come to my large hospital room on the Covid Unit to prepare me for discharge and show me how I was supposed to take off and put on the full body brace I had to wear for the sternal fracture and spinal breaks and the neck brace for the neck tears, and I was supposed to do this by myself. There was no way I could do this by myself. It was absurd. Was this the protocol for a car accident victim who also had Covid?

Pain shot through my spine and gripped my neck. In the big room by myself, I worried about my so-called Covid. I watched the Hallmark Channel all day, managing pain with Oxycodone, Tylenol, muscle relaxers, and help from the nurses getting in and out of the bed with great difficulty to go to the bathroom. Though I had tested positive for Covid, I did not have so much as a sniffle and hadn’t for over a year. I had been teaching on Zoom and hardly going anywhere.

I knew I didn’t have Covid. I probably had Covid in January and February of 2020 before tests and lockdowns. Sickness ran through the public school where I taught then — with staff and students hacking and coughing for weeks. I made a couple of trips to the urgent care center to receive antibiotics that didn’t work and then drove myself to the ER where I got an inhaler that helped me breathe better.

I missed four days of work. Finally, my health improved, and I hadn’t been sick since with any respiratory illness. I did, however, come down with a horribly painful outbreak of shingles on my face and mouth, probably from stress of having to wear the mask, teach on Zoom from an empty classroom, and take the mask off and on at arbitrary times.

The night of my accident, I was driving on a weeknight to have dinner with my then boyfriend, now husband, and a friend at a Mexican restaurant in rural Virginia, a restaurant that had remained delightfully opened and welcoming in the middle of the shutdowns. At an intersection, another driver struck my car on the driver’s side and sent my car spinning and careening and then landing in a ditch. I wasn’t speeding. I was wearing a seatbelt. The other driver had run a light at an intersection. She may have been stressed and distracted from lockdowns and fear we had all been enduring for a year since March 2020.

Read More – The Quarantine of Humans and Pets at the Height of Covid Mania 

Internet and cell phone services stopped working in Gaza on Friday night, after Israel “expanded” its military operation against Hamas militants in the Palestinian enclave.

The largest telecommunications provider in Gaza, Paltel, has announced “a complete severance of all communications and Internet services” due to intensified Israeli strikes.

“The intense bombing in the last hour caused the destruction of all remaining international routes linking Gaza to the outside world,” the company said.

‘Near-total blackout’ | Internet and cell phone services stop working in Gaza after Israel ‘expands’ its military operation against Hamas

Netblocks, a company that tracks internet connectivity globally, confirmed the information blackout, calling it “the largest single disruption to internet connectivity in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict and will be perceived by many as a total or near-total internet blackout.”

International media outlets, including RT, have partially lost contact with their crews and stringers on the ground. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told news organizations that Israel “cannot guarantee your employees’ safety, and strongly urge you to take all necessary measures for their safety,” according to a letter sent to Reuters and AFP.

The head of RT Arabic, Maya Manna, said there was no contact with correspondents and photographers operating in the Palestinian enclave as of Friday evening. The sole message came from an RT stringer in the area, describing a “very violent bombing.”

“I don’t know what to do with my children and my family. Everyone is afraid, everyone is terrified, and there is screaming everywhere in the Gaza Strip,” Masoud Abu Jarash, a local reporter, told RT.

According to an NBC News crew member, who was also able to message colleagues, “all internet, electricity and everything” has been cut off. “The situation we’re in is difficult, so difficult and very dangerous. We’re being extensively shelled by artillery and by air,” the unnamed staffer said.The UN children’s agency also lost contact with their colleagues in Gaza, with UNICEF chief Catherine Russel saying she was “extremely concerned about their safety and another night of unspeakable horror for 1 million children in Gaza.”

The international healthcare charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said there was no contact with some of their Palestinian colleagues.

“We are particularly worried for the patients, medical staff and thousands of families taking shelter at Al Shifa hospital and other health facilities,” MSF said, expressing deep concern over the situation regarding one of Gaza’s biggest medical centers.

Israel has accused Hamas of turning hospitals into “headquarters for their terror,” referring specifically to Al Shifa, and even published an “illustrative video” which supposedly points out the “different locations in and under the hospital which are being used to plan and implement terrorist activities.”

Hamas claims that by cutting off communications from Gaza, Israel is attempting to “cover up the crimes of the occupation without any oversight or accountability,” and tries to “create an image of victory,” a senior official, Osama Hamdan, told Al Jazeera.

Read More: Gaza Suffers Near-Total Information Blackout

 

 

 

 

At least three migrants were killed and another wounded during a gun battle in a village on the Hungary-Serbia border this week, according to reports.

The incident unfolded at around 4 a.m. on Friday in Horgoš, a small town in Serbia.

Local residents reported hearing “continuous gunfire and an explosion” in various areas, including an abandoned industrial complex and surrounding settlements, Magyar Nemzet reports.

The complex, which is reportedly controlled by an Afghan human smuggling ring, is used as a camp by illegal migrants making their way into Europe.

 

More trouble at our Southern border. According to reports residents of Horgoš, Serbia have been hearing continuous gunfire since 4 a.m. The uncertainty was palpable as gunfire persisted around the village for hours, making it feel like a “small-scale war”.
Police confirmed… pic.twitter.com/D8HjGz58au

— Zoltan Kovacs (@zoltanspox) October 27, 2023

“More trouble at our Southern border. According to reports residents of Horgoš, Serbia have been hearing continuous gunfire since 4 a.m. The uncertainty was palpable as gunfire persisted around the village for hours, making it feel like a ‘small-scale war,’” Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs wrote on social media.

“Police confirmed that at least three people of migrant background were killed and one wounded in the shootout that broke out between migrant gangs on the outskirts of the village.”

A large number of police officers were deployed to the scene but limited information has been made available.

Read More: Explosion as Migrant Gangs Battle at Hungary-Serbia Border

Although we generally think of climate change hysteria as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, this is not in fact the case. Arrogant, dictatorial, totalitarian political elites have been in love with the same basic idea before – the Nazi Party, for instance.

It has largely been forgotten today, but, as I discovered when writing my new book Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets, the German Nazi Party of the 1930s and 40s believed in climate change too: it’s just that they thought the world was growing inexorably colder, not warmer. Also, unlike political elites today, they tended to think climate change was a good thing, not a bad one: coping with harsh frost and ice would help the Aryan race grow hard and strong amidst the growing frozen wastes of our future ice planet. That would certainly come in handy if they ever tried invading Russia during the winter again.

The actual ‘science’ [sic] behind the Nazis’ own version of climate change is completely different from that of our own day – but, strangely, the social and political effects of quasi-enforced mass public belief in the phenomenon were often eerily similar to the kinds of things we can see going on with our own alleged climate crisis today. Personally, I don’t necessarily dispute the basic idea our climate today is changing (it always has), merely the dubious political superstructure subsequently built atop this initial notion.

The Nazi iteration of the same basic scientific scam – in which Hitler himself was a strong public believer – was termed Welteislehre (WEL), or ‘World-Ice Theory’. Significantly, WEL was billed not simply as an ordinary scientific proposal but a full-blown Kosmotechnische Weltanschauung, or ‘Cosmo-Technical Worldview’ – a comprehensive method of viewing the natural world through a highly distorted ideological lens which merged pseudoscience, philosophy, archaeology, religion, mythology, politics and racism into one heady brew of ‘cosmic cultural history’ containing pure ‘vitamins of the soul’.

WEL was developed by an Austrian engineer-turned-prophet with a truly epic beard named Hanns Hörbiger (1860-1931), who stubbornly refused to accept the existence of stars. Instead, Hörbiger taught apparent stars such as those shining within our own “so-called Milky Way” were actually an optical illusion caused by light from a few genuine suns far away, reflecting off a gigantic wall of planet-sized ice-blocks ringing our entire solar-system like icebergs bobbing upon the ocean of space-time.

Where did these icebergs originate? Billions of years ago, in the Constellation of the Dove, there had been a gigantic super-sun, millions of times larger than our own, orbited by a similarly huge super-planet, layered with ice hundreds of miles thick. As its orbit decayed, this ice-world fell into the super-sun and melted, emitting jets of super-charged steam. The sun then exploded, vomiting forth colossal lumps of super-heated magma which cooled and set solid into the well-loved planets of our current solar-system today. Mars, little more than a giant blob of ice, would one day pass so close to Earth that it would hoover up our atmosphere, rendering it a lifeless orb of snow.

Being perfectly positioned between fire and ice, Earth was presently the only non-frozen world left, a Goldilocks planet. Originally, our solar system had about 30 planets, but the smaller ones had entered into the larger ones’ orbits, becoming frozen ice moons; Saturn’s rings were the shattered remains of one such lunar body. Eventually, all the planets’ orbits would decay until they spiralled into the Sun, making it detonate, and the whole fire versus ice cycle would begin anew.

Huge oxygen clouds were also expelled from the original solar explosion, reacting with etheric layers of latent hydrogen, creating entire oceans’ worth of space water which then froze into those system-ringing space-bergs within the universe’s icy vacuum. Occasionally, one such space-glacier comes loose, floating into our sun’s gravitational field, causing hailstorms on Earth before splashing into the sun, creating a sun-spot, said Hanns.

Meanwhile, our present moon – Earth’s sixth such satellite, apparently – is continually accumulating more and more frozen material on its surface, shed from these passing loose space-bergs, becoming so over-laden it will ultimately sink violently down to Earth. Other smaller ice-moons had hurtled Earthwards thousands of years ago, the last of which, the ‘Tertiary’ or ‘Cenozoic’ moon, had destroyed Atlantis, also causing the biblical Great Flood and Twilight of the Gods of ancient Norse myth. The ultra-high tides caused by the Tertiary moon’s approach and fall had shaped the world’s salt and coal deposits, and all previous theories explaining how such substances were formed were yet more university-born lies.

Hörbiger’s idea, as laid out in a rambling, unstructured 1913 book of some 790 pages, Glacial Cosmology, initially flopped badly, despite his enlistment of an amateur German moon-mapper, Philipp Fauth (1867-1941), as co-author to lace it with plausible-sounding technical language. Embittered, Hörbiger thought jealous non-WEL astronomers were engaged in an unpatriotic Judaeo-Bolshevik conspiracy against the poetic Austro-German soul, so in 1918, observing how citizens had been sold on the First World War via propaganda, the self-declared “German genius” (who, like Hitler, wasn’t even actually German) decided to use the fortune he had accumulated from a special type of valve he had patented from his old engineering days to appeal directly to scientifically illiterate members of the public instead. In short, rather than persuading people of the truth of his ideas logically, he sought to persuade them emotionally instead.

“What agrees with it is right, what cannot be united with it is wrong,” declared Hörbiger of his idea, like all good pseudoscientific ideologues. “Either you learn to believe in me, or I must treat you as an enemy,” he warned one sceptic who argued measurements of the lunar surface proved it far too warm to be covered in miles of ice. As such evidence was irrefutable, it was easier to ignore it and smear opponents as traitorous political adherents of Jewish Physics instead, instrumental data being mere “weapons directed against the spirit of Parsifal”, the legendary Wagnerian knight-hero.

Read More: The Bizarre History of Nazi Climate Change Propaganda

Albany’s war against parents’ right to control, or even know, what medical procedures are done to our children continues with Assembly Bill A6761 (Karines Reyes, D-Bronx). Up to now most of these bills only allowed for vaccines to be given to minors without parental consent, but A6761 cuts to a core goal of the medical services and products industry: it completely eliminates parents’ right to make medical decisions for their children. Children of any age could be given drugs, including psychiatric drugs, vaccines, dental procedures, hospitalization, and surgery without parental knowledge or consent, and allows Medicaid funds to pay for anything that is done to the child. This is simply the worst children’s health bill ever.

A6761 proposes a new paragraph for Public Health law Section 2504,

“8. Any person, including a minor, who comprehends the need for, the nature of and the reasonably foreseeable risks and benefits involved in any contemplated medical, dental, health and/or hospital services and any alternatives thereto, may give effective consent to such services for themselves, and the consent of no other person shall be necessary. The commissioner is authorized to promulgate rules and regulations necessary to effectuate the provisions of this subdivision.”

TAKE ACTION
Please click HERE to send a message to your Assemblymember expressing your opposition to A6761.

And please call your Assemblymember and politely let the staffer know you want your Assemblymember to oppose this radically dangerous bill.

The following legislators, including, unfortunately, Assembly Health Committee Chair Amy Paulin, have co-sponsored A6761. Please call them and politely ask that they reconsider their support.

Karines Reyes, Sponsor, (718) 931-2620, (518) 455-5102

Any Paulin, Chair of the Assembly Health Committee, (914) 723-1115, (518) 455-4292

Linda Rosenthal, (212) 873-6368, (518) 455-5802

Andrew Hevesi, (718) 263-5595, (518) 455-4296

The Official Description of A6761 is misleading

The official description of the bill claims that it, “Allows homeless youth to give effective consent to certain medical, dental, health, and hospital services, provides for insurance coverage of such health care services consented to be such youth.”

But Albany passed a law last year (A9604/S8937), in less than 10 weeks from introduction to passage by both houses, that went into effect in March 2023, that allows homeless and runaway minors to make medical decisions without parental knowledge or consent.

The real-world effect of A9604/S8937 is that parents lost all rights to make medical decisions for their children, or even know what is being done to our children, if the child either runs away from home or the family becomes homeless.

Contrary to the representations made by proponents of this bill, New York law already allowed for physicians to treat runaway youth if the child’s health is in danger and a parent cannot be reached, New York Public Health Law, Paragraph 4. This bill did not even make it to our attention since we do not monitor homeless and runaway issues, but obviously, we should have.

So if runaway youth are already allowed to get needed healthcare, what was the point for A9604/S8937? A celebratory press release issued by the Legal Aid Society following passage of the bill in the New York Senate spilled the beans,

“Gender-affirming healthcare is a life-saving treatment. (A.9604/S.8937) will ensure the right of young TGNC New Yorkers to access gender-affirming healthcare.”

Read More: The Worst Children’s Health Bill Ever

Taiwan considers its ability to counter a Chinese invasion attempt with lessons learned from Gaza and Ukraine.

Slovakia will not be supplying weapons to Ukraine, the defense minister has reiterated

Slovakia is seeking to review the Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) with the United States to ensure that the deal remains “mutually beneficial,” and as a result will halt arms shipments to Ukraine, the newly-appointed Defense Minister Robert Kalinak has announced.

“When things ain’t working out you need to fix it,” Robert Kalinak wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday, following a meeting with US Ambassador Gautam Rana, where he said “mutual interests and current security challenges were discussed.” 

“Slovakia’s foreign and defense policy has experienced failure after failure and Slovaks can no longer pay for the mistakes of their leader,” he explained, adding that the current agreement is “ill-formulated” and puts Slovakia under the obligation to relinquish “much-needed military equipment and ammunition.”

Read more

Ukraine ‘one of the most corrupt countries in the world’ – EU state’s PM

Kalinak stressed that Slovakia greatly values cooperation with its “Western partners,” but the newly elected leadership will not follow in the footsteps of the previous “servile government” and will act in the interest of its own people. 

“We conveyed to the US Ambassador at the meeting the position of the pro-Slovak Government – we will not send new shipments from Slovak ammunition depots to Ukraine and the defense agreement will have to be modified,” the defense minister concluded.

Read more

No more military aid for Ukraine – EU state’s new PM

Slovakia has officially suspended any military aid to Ukraine after the Slovak Social Democracy party secured victory in parliamentary elections in September. Prime Minister Robert Fico vowed that not “a single round [of ammunition] will be sent to Ukraine.”

On Friday, Fico again questioned the EU’s unprecedented funding to Kiev, rejecting the proposed new tranche of €50 billion and saying that Slovakia will only agree to increased contribution to the EU if promised that the funds will not  be “embezzled” by Kiev.

The PM described the battle with Hamas as Israel’s “second war of independence”

The Israeli military has launched the “second stage” of war against Hamas militants in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address on Saturday night, while warning citizens to prepare for a long struggle ahead.

“In the initial weeks of the war, we launched massive airstrikes that dealt a severe blow to the enemy… We eliminated many terrorists,” the PM said in his address to the Israelis.

In three weeks of Israeli air raids, the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 8,000 people, “half of whom are children,” the health ministry in the Hamas-controlled Palestinian enclave told AFP early Sunday. It remains unclear how many of the casualties were actual combatants.

“However, we are only at the beginning of the road. The battle within the Gaza Strip will be difficult and long,” Netanyahu warned, while stressing that “this is our second War of Independence. This is our mission, our purpose in life, and together we will prevail.”

Read more

War entering ‘new phase’ – Israeli defense minister

The IDF’s expansion of its operation comes almost three weeks after Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on the Jewish state, hammering Israeli towns and cities with rockets and raiding settlements near the Gaza border. Around 1,400 Israelis have been killed since the war began, and over 200 taken hostage, according to Israeli officials.

“Last night, additional ground forces entered Gaza, marking the beginning of the second stage of the war, whose goal is to destroy the military and political capabilities of Hamas and to bring our kidnapped citizens back,” Netanyahu declared.

Read more

Hamas official reveals conditions for hostages’ release to RT

Israeli warplanes pounded Gaza with airstrikes throughout Friday and Saturday nights, as ground troops and armor were launched in a significant incursion into the Palestinian enclave. It is unclear, however, whether the ongoing “expanded” ground operations will be followed by a larger invasion. There are concerns that a full-scale invasion may result in heavy Israeli casualties and trigger an escalation with other regional players, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant also said on Saturday that Israel has “moved on to a new phase in the war,” and said that ground operations in Gaza will continue “until new orders are given.”

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