The Times, Sky News and The Standard all cover our main item, on Rishi Sunak’s visit to Israel, during which the PM pledged to stand by Israel in its “darkest hour”, with The Times focussing on Sunak’s call for Saudi Arabia to help reduce tensions in the region.

ITV News reports on President Biden’s speech from the Oval Office to ask Congress for $100 billion in wartime aid for Israel and Ukraine. This was just the second time in his presidency that Biden has addressed the nation from behind the Resolute Desk. Sky News focused its coverage of the speech on Biden’s comparison between Putin’s Russia and Hamas, when he stated that both actors “want to completely annihilate a neighbouring democracy.”

The Guardian reports that Israel’s security officials have signalled their readiness for a ground offensive into Gaza, with Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, telling troops on the Gaza border: “You see Gaza now from a distance, you will soon see it from inside. The command will come.”

The Times’ Anshel Pfeffer writes that “it is still far from clear what Israel does intend once its army has destroyed Hamas’s military capabilities and leadership. Some Israeli military experts believe that it will have to create security buffer zones, similar to the ones it had in southern Lebanon until 2000, in Gaza, to protect communities across the border. However, that is not a solution to the dangerous vacuum that will remain in Gaza once the Israeli army pulls out.”

The Financial Times’ Kim Ghattas writes on the impact of recent events on the putative normalisation deal with Saudi Arabia, such a focus of optimism prior to October 7^th. “If, or when, normalisation talks between Israel and Saudi resume with either Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or his successor,” she writes, “the Palestinian component of the equation will have to be considerable. So far, the Saudis may have been content with the minimum possible for the Palestinians as part of a greater deal more focused on the kingdom’s needs. After this cycle of violence, however, that will no longer suffice.”

The Financial Times also speaks to Israel’s living on the country’s northern border amid an escalation in Hezbollah aggression. “Usually the threat we face is missiles,” said Lea Raivitz, a spokesperson for the Bar’a, community, most of whose members are now living in a hotel on the shore of Lake Galilee to the south; “but this time [the] threat could come from the other side: terrorists coming into our houses”.

The BBC and The Times cover news that a deal allowing some supplies through Egypt’s Rafah crossing has now been struck by the US and Egypt. About 20 trucks carrying water, food and medicine aid are set to pass through the Rafah crossing in the coming days.

On a related topic, The Independent reports a cross-party group of UK MPs calling Britain’s increase of its aid to the Palestinians to £10 million “pitiful”.

The BBC also reports that US warships intercepted missiles fired from Yemen “potentially towards Israel”. The Pentagon’s Brigadier General Patrick Ryder said three land attack cruise missiles and several drones fired from Yemen had been downed.

Yediot Ahronot’s Yossi Yehoshua focusses on the northern front, and Hezbollah’s increasingly aggressive posture. “The closer the ground incursion in Gaza approaches,” he writes, “the more Hezbollah is sending signals to Israel—not by means of diplomacy, but rather by means of fire—that it is willing to intensify the challenge to the IDF on the northern front. The big question—and there is no answer to it as of now—is how far the secretary general will take the escalation. The IDF discerned—even before the escalation—a change in Nasrallah’s self-confidence. Despite his colossal mistake in 2006, he seems to be encouraged by Hamas’s successful blow. No less important,” Yehoshua continues, “is what Tehran decides. In the end, with all of Hassan Nasrallah’s dominance in the era of the aftermath of Qasem Soleimani’s assassination, the Iranians are the ones who built Hezbollah as a means of delivering a second strike in the event that Israel attacks their nuclear facilities. As we learned in the hardest way possible, it was Hamas that took the lead, and employing Hezbollah only as Hamas’s derivative would be a dramatic decision, certainly after an explicit warning by the US president about the consequences of Hizbullah-Iran fully joining in the fighting.”

Israel Hayom covers Israeli National Security Council Director Tzahi Hanegbi apparently telling the leaders of Israel’s western allies that the most likely possibility in the event of Hamas being toppled in the Gaza Strip was “transferring control to the Palestinian Authority.” “While the security cabinet has no answers for the day after,” the paper says, “Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and National Security Council Director Tzahi Hanegbi promised US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that Israel does not intend to control the Gaza Strip.” The paper notes that this is a change of direction from previous Netanyahu policies regarding the potential unification of the Palestinian national movement. “The man who promoted the theory of separation between Gaza and Judea and Samaria,” it notes, “is now telling world leaders the exact opposite and is taking steps to reconnect Gaza to Judea and Samaria under the sole control of Abu Mazen or whoever succeeds him.”

Yediot Ahronot’s Sima Kadmon uses her column to call on Netanyahu to resign. “Just before he departed,” she writes, “after delivering his compassionate and empathetic speech, all I wanted was to fall at Biden’s feet, hug him tight, and tell him quietly, pleadingly: please, don’t leave us… But Biden left, and along with him left the delicacy, the comforting words, and the consoling embrace. All the things that we need so badly, things that no sophisticated aircraft carrier could give us, which the president of the United States managed to give us in a few hours of his presence here. It seems to me that a large majority of the Israeli public shares the sentiment that the person managing us is unfit; that he, who caused the greatest accident in the State of Israel’s history, still has his hands on the wheel… Netanyahu ought to go, and Biden and the leaders of other countries know it… The man who was Mr. Security, who promised us so many times that he would topple Hamas, that he would protect our safety, has lost the people’s confidence.”

Kadmon’s Yediot Ahronot colleague Nahum Barnea makes a similar demand: “I admit, the rage is stronger than me. So is the sense of betrayal. I go to Sderot, to Kibbutz Beeri, and I don’t know how to channel the anger. I was at the funeral on Wednesday of one of the murder victims, in Omer, near Beer Sheva. The faces of the mourners reflected the shock of the betrayal. Shlomo Karhi, one of the more authentic representatives of the Netanyahu government, said that he doesn’t understand why there is any expectation that the ministers ask forgiveness. The truth is, there is no such expectation. Neither for an apology nor for forgiveness. They should just leave.”

Maariv’s latest polling shows endorsement of their view of the low public trust in Netanyahu and the government. If voters were casting their ballot today, the Likud would secure a mere 18 seats to Benny Gantz’s National Unity Party’s 40. Overall, the coalition would be projected to secure a mere 43 seats in the 120-person Knesset. Netanyahu also trails Gantz 28 percent to 48 percent on who would make the better prime minister.

Maariv’s Ben Caspit salutes the heroism and unity of the Israeli people in responding to Hamas’s barbarity. “Together with the horror, despite the catastrophe, in the shadow of the tragedy,” he writes, “there are also reasons to feel encouraged. In the government’s absence, we discovered ourselves and the strength within us. We discovered what happens to us when our enemies rise up to annihilate us, and the stories of heroism, which will be told at length. Combat soldiers, officers, reservists, but primarily civilians: routine security coordinators, kibbutzniks, parents, sons and daughters, people who fought for their homes, and sometimes for the little children inside them. People who bodily prevented an exponentially worse disaster.”

Haaretz’s Aluf Benn focusses on the intelligence failings which led to Israel being entirely unprepared for Hamas to attack in the way that it did. Hamas, he writes, “kept their extensive plans from leaking and pulled off a perfectly executed deception: The Israel political and military leadership, from Benjamin Netanyahu on down, was convinced that Hamas was deterred and mainly focused on economic growth and not preparations for an invasion… the IDF assumed,” he continues, “that the Hamas elite force was being built to fight the IDF… and interpreted it as a sign of Hamas becoming more establishment and transforming from a terrorist organisation into a regular army. Israel failed to grasp that the confrontation with the IDF would only be a secondary mission, while the main effort would be a mass slaughter of civilians in their homes and at a large outdoor event, all through the area, and all at the same time.”

Yediot Ahronot’s foreign news editor, Daniel Bettini, focusses on the role of the international media. “We, the foreign news editors,” he writes, “have great respect for the leading media outlets in Europe and the US…” But, in the context of the premature attributing of this week’s Gazan hospital blast to Israel, Bettini continues that “a red line was crossed. In my view, as a journalist, their [international media] behaviour was no less than disgraceful.”