Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva resigned Monday amid the ongoing political fallout in Jerusalem over failures surrounding Hamas’ surprise Oct. 7 attack — the deadliest terrorist assault in Israel‘s history that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took some 250 hostages into Gaza.

The development could set the stage for more resignations among Israel‘s top security brass. It comes amid ongoing fears of direct escalation between Israel and Iran. Israeli forces carried out a strike inside Iran on Friday in retaliation for Iran’s April 13 missile and drone attack on Israel. The Israeli strike was limited in scope. A report Monday said Israeli forces planned a much bigger attack, but scaled it back in the face of pressure from the U.S. and other allies to avoid triggering an all-out war.

Pentagon Correspondent Mike Glenn reports that the Israel Defense Forces used a locally produced air-to-surface missile dubbed the Rampage in its strike on an airfield near the city of Isfahan in central Iran.

Despite lacking a formal alliance, China and Russia have aligned themselves against the West. They conduct periodic joint military drills, including air and sea patrols in the East China Sea and Sea of Japan, and naval exercises in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon has taken a deeper look, writing from the region on new findings that suggest Chinese firms’ exports of dual-use components to Russian counterparts have soared, helping those companies build materials for the Kremlin’s war machine. U.S. officials say Beijing is now the primary contributor to Moscow’s defense industrial base.

China argues that, unlike the West, it has not exported actual weaponry to either side in the war with Ukraine and has continually called for peace talks and Western diplomatic engagement with Russia. Chinese President Xi Jinping has spoken with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and supplied humanitarian aid. But German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to China last week cast a spotlight on the difficulty of the situation. Mr. Scholz called on Mr. Xi to “contribute more to a just peace in Ukraine.”

It’s been a hectic few days for foreign and national security policy on Capitol Hill. Here’s some clarity. The GOP-controlled House on Friday passed a sweeping package of four separate bills that include $61 billion for Ukraine, $23 billion for Israel and $8 billion for Indo-Pacific allies to fend off China.

The package also sanctions Iran, Russia and China and permits using seized Russian assets to pay for some of the Ukraine spending. And it includes a provision requiring video-sharing app TikTok to divest from its China-based parent company within a year. The package will be taken up by the Senate on Tuesday. But President Biden has already scored a major victory by getting the Ukraine war aid through with help from GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is now in jeopardy of losing his post to a revolt on his right flank.

On a separate front, the U.S. intelligence community won a victory Saturday, with Mr. Biden signing a two-year extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The extension cleared the Senate on a bipartisan vote of 60-34 on Friday.

There is a “high probability” that Russia will move against other countries in Europe if it can defeat Ukraine on the battlefield, according to Polish President Andrzej Duda.

Mr. Duda described “Russian imperialism” as “insatiable” in an appearance on Fox News over the weekend, calling on NATO to continue backing Ukraine and for member nations to increase their own defense spending. NATO currently sets defense spending for its members at 2% of GDP, but Mr. Duda said the total should be pushed up to 3%.

Poland is spending more than 4%, with a portion used to purchase U.S.-made weapons such as the Patriot missile system.

Israel’s powerful military machine has carried out what has been described as an unspeakably brutal “massacre,” even a “genocide” against innocent civilians trapped in the Gaza Strip. An Israeli strike on the southern city of Rafah over the weekend is reported to have killed 22 people, including 18 children.

But data shows the campaign to defeat Hamas in the densely populated Palestinian enclave has resulted in a lower ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths than other high-profile urban battles this century, including some directly involving the U.S., according to a report by National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang. 

The civilian versus combatant death ratio is less than 2-to-1 in what analysts describe as one of the most complex urban warfare operations ever conducted. It’s also far less than the 2016-2017 battle of Mosul, a U.S.-backed operation to defeat Islamic State terrorists who controlled the Iraqi city. About 10,000 civilians and about 4,000 Islamic State militants were killed in that offensive, according to John Spencer at the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

With the Jewish holiday of Passover beginning Monday at sundown, columnist Don Feder reflects that since the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, a “tidal wave of antisemitism has swept over the West.”

“Passover helps to put it in perspective,” writes Mr. Feder. “The monsters murdering and torturing the innocent, launching rocket barrages and shouting their vile slogans in the streets aren’t just targeting Jews. They aim to destroy the foundation of civilization. The war we find ourselves in is part of the eternal struggle of good versus evil, law versus chaos.”

Former State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert writes that Russia’s kidnapping of Ukrainian children is “a war crime of historic proportions, but nothing is being done to stop it.”

“The official number of children confirmed kidnapped from Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s regime is 20,000, but Moscow has bragged that their forces have trafficked over 700,000 Ukrainian children,” Ms. Nauert writes in an op-ed published by the New York Post. She writes that “Republicans and Democrats, including President Biden, must collectively call out Putin for his government-sanctioned kidnapping.”

• April 22 — The Road to Washington’s NATO Summit, U.S. Institute of Peace.

• April 22 — Ten Years to Save the West: Former Prime Minister Liz Truss on Fighting the Global Left, Heritage Foundation.

• April 23 — Advancing Stability in Northern Nigeria, U.S. Institute of Peace.

• April 23 — Energy Security and Geopolitics Conference, Center for Strategic and International Studies.

• April 23 — Navigating the Seas with Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Chief of Naval Operations of the U.S. Navy, Center for Strategic and International Studies.

• April 25 — Book Event: “Tackling the China Challenge with Strength,” Hudson Institute.