The war between Israel and Hamas has revealed extensive Chinese support for Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups that the U.S. and Israel consider terrorist organizations, according to strategic analyst Guermantes Lailari.

Mr. Lailari, in a report published by the Jewish Policy Center, said that the Israel Defense Forces uncovered large caches of Chinese-made weapons, including QLZ87 automatic grenade launchers, intelligence-gathering gear and other military supplies during raids in Gaza. The report claims Chinese rocket technology was also found in a Hamas weapons laboratory. China claims to be neutral in the war, and some have suggested the Chinese weaponry reached the Palestinians via Iran.

The Israeli military is aggressively disputing reports that it has relied on an artificial intelligence system for a targeted killing program that tolerates civilian deaths as acceptable collateral damage in its war against Hamas. Explosive allegations that Israel has a secret AI-powered killing machine called “Lavender” spread on Wednesday in a pair of news reports citing anonymous intelligence sources involved in the Hamas-Israel war.  

The Israel Defense Forces said Wednesday evening that it does not use AI to designate people as targets for military strikes. “Contrary to claims, the IDF does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist,” the IDF said in a statement posted to its website. “Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process.”

The statement came after +972 Magazine and The Guardian reported that Israel was allowing the AI system to direct human analysts’ judgment in a rush to fight back against Hamas soon after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Full details on the use of AI in the Hamas-Israel war may not emerge anytime soon, but the IDF has acknowledged some of its AI capabilities on its website. The online publication SpyTalk reported in February on the IDF website’s mention of an AI targeting system dubbed “Gospel.” The publication claimed the system was proving lethal to Gaza civilians.

The developments come days after an Israeli airstrike in Gaza this week killed seven international aid workers, a strike Israeli officials said was a mistake. With three U.K. citizens among those killed, more than 600 British jurists, including three retired judges from the U.K. Supreme Court, called on the government Wednesday to suspend arms sales to Israel. Diplomatic friction is separately brewing between Poland and Israel over a Polish aid worker who was also killed in the strike. 

U.S. intelligence agencies are increasingly under fire from critics who say the government is downplaying what a recent media investigation asserted was Russia’s covert use of a new type of beam weapon that inflicted brain injuries on scores of American diplomats and intelligence officials.

While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated in its annual threat assessment last month that most U.S. spy agencies concluded that “it is very unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible” for so-called “Havana syndrome,” Greg Edgreen, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who investigated the syndrome for the Defense Intelligence Agency, believes Russia is behind what appear to be acoustic or microwave attacks. Mr. Edgreen provided new information during an in-depth investigative report broadcast Sunday by CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which worked with Der Spiegel and an opposition Russian news outlet called The Insider.

According to Mr. Edgreen, the Pentagon gathered a large amount of information on the brain attacks, including human and signals intelligence, intelligence from human spies, and open-source data from the internet and from travel and financial records. “Unfortunately, I can’t get into specifics, based on the classification. But I can tell you at a very early stage, I started to focus on Moscow,” he said.

The Navy’s decision to ask Congress for only a single Virginia-class fast-attack submarine in its fiscal year 2025 budget request wasn’t some “inside the Beltway” maneuver to trick Congress into securing enough funds to pay for a second sub, the service’s comptroller says.

Assistant Navy Secretary Russell Rumbaugh says it was a “real decision” that can be confirmed by the service’s unfunded priority list. Asking for one rather than two Virginia-class submarines is “recognizing a fundamental reality” on the part of the Navy and the Defense Department, he said at an event Wednesday hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.

The Navy has bought two Virginia-class cruise missile-carrying submarines every year since 2011 — even during years when the service did not request one, Mr. Rumbaugh said. The service has 16 of the submarines appropriated, with 14 currently under contract, but construction yards in the U.S. have tens of billions of dollars worth of backlogged orders.

The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday announced an investigation into what they say is massive bungling by the Homeland Security Department, which failed to file summonses with the immigration courts for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, causing some 200,000 cases to be dismissed.

The Washington Times’ Stephen Dinan reports that the department has managed to refile the charges in only one-quarter of the cases, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, leaving the rest of the affected immigrants free to roam the U.S. without any case against them.

Russian President Vladimir Putin should be concerned about his credibility and the support of the Russian people and elites, given the recent sham election that added six more years to his 24-year reign, security failures surrounding the ISIS-K terrorist attack outside Moscow, and reports that Russia has suffered over 300,000 military casualties in Ukraine, writes regular columnist Joseph R. DeTrani.

Mr. DeTrani examines how Mr. Putin has come to need China and North Korea to support his efforts to recreate the Russian Empire, noting how the Russian president wants China and North Korea to share its view of the U.S. as the enemy. “Hopefully, China will push back and not align itself with a revanchist Russian Federation. And North Korea will realize, assuming the U.S. and South Korea are more flexible and creative in their approach to Pyongyang, that it is in North Korea’s interest, for the security of the country and the well-being of its people, to have a normal relationship with the U.S. and South Korea,” he writes.