LONDON: On Oct. 6, 1973, Israel was taken completely unawares by an attack by a coalition of Middle East states, led by Egypt, that came very close to wiping it off the map.

In the end Israel, backed by a massive airlift of advanced weaponry and other support from the US, survived the Yom Kippur War, albeit at great cost — more than 2,600 of its soldiers were killed, and thousands more wounded.

But “it was a massive intelligence failure,” said Ahron Bregman, a UK-based Israeli historian, author and political scientist.

BEIRUT: Three Lebanese soldiers were lightly injured Friday by Israeli shelling in southern Lebanon, medical sources said, while the Lebanese army reported no casualties in a second attack on a hospital.
Hezbollah also announced the death of four of its fighters on Friday.
“Israeli artillery fire targeted the vicinity of a Lebanese army post in Ras el-Naqura, lightly injuring three soldiers,” a medical source told AFP.
An AFP photographer at the scene saw the soldiers lying on stretchers, exhibiting signs of breathing difficulties but with no open wounds.

RAMALLAH: Israeli forces shot dead six Palestinians on Friday in a raid on a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, as the army confirmed it conducted a “counterterrorism” operation.

GENEVA: Gaza’s health system is on its knees and cannot afford to lose another ambulance or a single hospital bed, the World Health Organization has warned, “The situation is getting more and more horrible by the day … beyond belief, literally,” WHO spokeperson Christian Lindmeier told a press briefing in Geneva.
“The health system is on its knees. Gaza cannot afford to lose any more health facilities, another single ambulance, any more hospitals … or even a single hospital bed more.”

CAIRO: Hamas said on Friday that Israel had bombed Gaza’s medieval Omari Mosque causing widespread destruction to the building and calling it a “heinous, barbaric crime.”
Photographs carried by Hamas-run media in Gaza that Reuters could not immediately verify showed massive damage to the mosque, with fallen walls and roofs and a huge crack at the bottom of the stone minaret.
Reuters journalists from Gaza identified the minaret in the picture as being that of the Omari Mosque.