An updated assessment suggested that as many as 400 Hezbollah terrorists have been killed by IDF troops in recent days.

During one clash on Thursday, Israeli forces eliminated 15 Hezbollah terrorists, while one IDF soldier was wounded in the battle. Overall, nine Israeli soldiers have been killed since the fighting began with Hezbollah terrorists in southern Lebanon. Like the Hamas terrorist organization, Hezbollah has deliberately embedded itself in civilian structures, including schools, mosques, hospitals and residential buildings, which constitutes a war crime under international law.

The IDF’s 98th and 36th Divisions are currently engaging Hezbollah terrorists in numerous villages and towns in southern Lebanon. In addition, troops have uncovered large caches of weapons left behind by Hezbollah forces.

The IDF announced it is conducting “limited, localized, and targeted raids.” The overall goal of the IDF ground offensive is to neutralize the Hezbollah threat close to the Israeli border and enable the return of some 60,000 evacuated Israelis to their homes in northern Israel after one year.

On Friday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned that Israel has “more surprises in store” and stressed that the IDF had already delivered severe blows to Hezbollah.

“Hezbollah is receiving very severe blows, one after the other. We eliminated [Hezbollah chief Hassan] Nasrallah and we have more surprises in store, some of which have already been carried out and some of which will be carried out,” Gallant stated during his visit to the 36th Division headquarters in northern Israel.

“[Hezbollah’s] missile and rocket division suffered a very heavy blow. A significant part was destroyed as a result of a high-quality and precise operation. Command and control headquarters, communications, the entire leadership of [the elite Radwan Force], and in fact, the entire second and third tiers of command below Nasrallah were eliminated,” the defense minister added.

Gallant also said the Israeli military was currently “carrying out an operation today in several villages, and this process will continue wherever necessary to destroy all the infrastructure from which Hezbollah planned to carry out attacks.”

Since launching an unprovoked attack on Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces in Lebanon have fired over 9,000 rockets, missiles and exploding drones into the Jewish state.

Dozens of Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers have been killed and Israel has responded by stepping up its attacks on Hezbollah forces assets across Lebanon and in neighboring Syria since last week.

In recent weeks, the IDF has eliminated most of Hezbollah’s top leadership, including Sec.-Gen. Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed last Friday in a massive Israeli aerial strike on Hezbollah’s headquarters in the Lebanese capital of Beirut.

The Israeli military has stressed that the current ground offensive in southern Lebanon is limited in scope, and it seeks to wrap up the intensive phase of the operation within a few weeks.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military announced on Friday that it had eliminated Muhammad Rashid Sakafi, a senior Hezbollah operatively, in an aerial strike in Beirut. Sakafi was the head of the terror group’s communications division.

“Sakafi invested significant efforts to develop communication capabilities between all of Hezbollah’s units in all periods of operation, to maintain the flow of information throughout the terrorist organization,” the IDF stated.

The prime minister not only spoke about the IDF’s ground operations in Gaza against Hamas terrorists and the situation on Israel’s northern border with Hezbollah forces, but also addressed the political issues facing his coalition government, including the Draft Law, anti-government protests, and the fallout of the failed judicial reform legislation last year.

Regarding the controversial ultra-Orthodox Draft Law, Netanyahu stated that “the willingness of the ultra-orthodox public to enlist changed in the wake of the war” and also noted a piece of legislation demanded by the ultra-Orthodox parties, “the Rabbi’s Law,” which would give the ultra-Orthodox parties more control over the appointments of municipal rabbis, and make it harder to dismiss them.

[…]

— Read More: allisrael.com

“We are in a religious war. We got caught up in our watch in a war upon all that is holy and precious to us,” Gafni said.

Gafni’s comments came in reference to the recent protests over segregated Yom Kippur prayers at Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv on Monday. Both religious and secular leaders have traded blame over the fighting last week.

“What we saw on Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv, we saw why they are intend, while people were praying Kol Nidrei [the prayer asking for release from all erroneous vows], they came from the protest group, as they call themselves” Gafni continued. “Pulling on the tzitzit of those praying there. We are in the midst of a religious war.”

Gafni said the issue was no longer the judicial reforms but the character of the coalition government as religious Jewish.

“We haven’t been talking about that [the reforms] for months already,” Gafni stated.

He also claimed that the ideological conflict is why members of his party haven’t given any interviews in recent months.

Gafni also disputed claims that judicial reforms and coalition agreements were detrimental to Israel’s economy.

“I met with the leading economists many months ago, and they explained to me about the reform, what a difficult problem it is, and what might happen to the economy if it passed,” he said.

“By the way, quite a long time has passed since then and the economy is in excellent shape,” he claimed.

However, the economic figures released in September do not appear to support Gafni’s claim. They showed a widening fiscal deficit to 1.3% of the GDP during August compared to the previous months.

This was apparently due to increasing government expenditures as tax revenues declined. According to the Jewish Press, the coalition’s extra-budgetary spending has reached around NIS 13.7 billion ($3.6 billion), compared with NIS 2 billion ($530 million) under the former Israeli Bennett-Lapid government.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid party responded to Gafni’s comments.

In a post to his Facebook page, Lapid wrote: “No, Rabbi Gafni, we are not in a religious war, because we have the same religion. We are Jews. All of us. Jews believe, and faith has all kinds of forms and ways.”

“We don’t need any guidance on how to be Jews. The Bible is ours, Jewish history is ours, the Kol Nidre prayer is ours, and for the attempt to incite a civil war, there is no atonement on Yom Kippur.”

Lapid continued his criticism of Gafni, saying: “There is no religious war in Israel, and it is forbidden for there to be one because it is the dream of the antisemites. There is a conflict over the character of Israel, over its values, and its democracy.”

Lapid also accused the coalition of harming the security of the country and its economy by supporting extreme interest groups.

Brockman — whose company OpenAI is widely understood to be the most advanced AI project in the world — made these comments during a panel discussion that included Netanyahu, Elon Musk and MIT physicist Max Tegmark. As they gathered to discuss the future of AI, much of the conversation orbited around two possible futures: A future extinction of mankind, and a future “heaven” in which AGI eliminates poverty, hunger, and sickness and mankind merges with machines.

Brockman acknowledged the major risks in creating AGI but told the rest of the panel that it is this “heaven” that his company is working to bring about.

“I think this whole arc, in my mind, is all about paradigm shift, right?” Brockman said. “And I think that, even the question of what would that heaven, post-AGI, positive future look like? I think even that is hard for us to imagine what the true upside could be.”

Brockman went on to name one thinker, in particular, who he believes best understands the future of AI.

“The thinker who I think had the best foresight about how the AI revolution was going to play out is actually Ray Kurzweil,” he argued, with Musk immediately expressing his agreement.

Kurzweil, a Jewish author and inventor who currently works as a director of engineering at Google, is a famous transhumanist, most known for his books predicting “the Singularity.”

“His book Singularity is Near gets, like, a lot of shit,” Brockman went on to say.

“I think that people, you know, kind of assume it’s going to be this…religious text, but it’s instead a very dry, analytical text. And he just looks at the compute curves, and he says this is the fundamental un-locker of intelligence. Everyone thought that was crazy, and now it’s basically true — it’s basically common wisdom. And part of what he says is, ‘Look, what’s going to happen is in 2030 — first of all he says AGI: 2029.”

Here Musk again interjected: “Yeah. I keep telling people, it seems to be almost exactly right.”

“It’s spooky. It’s spooky,” Brockman continued. “2030 is when the merge happens. So we’ve got Neuralink coming. And uh, you know, maybe other systems like that. And what does it mean once you actually are kind of merging with an intelligence?”

While Musk said he believed his brain-computer interfaces — which are being developed through his company Neuralink — may not be quite ready for Kurzweil’s 2030 prediction, he agreed that humanity is on the doorstep of the “singularity.”

“You know, sometimes digital superintelligence is called, like, a singularity — like a black hole. Because just like with a black hole, it’s difficult to predict what happens after you pass the event horizon…” he said.

“And we are currently circling the event horizon of the black hole that is digital superintelligence.”

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