Operation Swords of Iron: What happened on Day 13?

A US Navy warship traveling near Yemen intercepted multiple projectiles, a US official told Reuters on Thursday. The missiles, according to Israeli media citing the Pentagon, were launched at Israel.

Washington is on heightened alert for activity by Iran-backed groups as regional tensions soar during the Israel-Hamas war.

The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said there were no injuries and a number of projectiles, including drones, were brought down near the destroyer USS Carney.

Former Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal said on Thursday that the group has a number of Israeli soldiers, held as hostages, which are enough to negotiate releasing all the Palestinian prisoners in Israel.

Meshaal, who heads Hamas' diaspora office, made the remarks during an exclusive interview to Al Arabiya TV.

Earlier, Mashaal said Hamas's Israeli captives include high-ranking officers from the Gaza Division.

US Special Envoy David Satterfield met on Thursday with Israeli and Egyptian officials to develop the exact mechanism to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Thursday.

Israeli government is worried about the possible diversion of aid to benefit Hamas, Miller said, a concern Washington shares. But he added that the United States expects assistance to be able to get into Gaza and that it wants to see "sustained" aid move into the enclave.

The number of deaths at the Al-Ahli Arab hospital caused by the misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile on Wednesday night may have been grossly misrepresented by local sources, according to Thursday reports from a number of independent intelligence sources as well as European news sources.

Local Hamas-run Gazan sources allege that 471 people were killed at the hospital; foreign independent intelligence sources claimed instead that the number was closer to 10-50. 

France's Le Monde noted in a Thursday analysis that at least 15 lifeless bodies were visible in verified video footage of the area moments after the explosion. Four of those were bodies of infants. 

On October 7, Yuval de Paz, 29, was at home with his girlfriend when he heard the sirens.

De Paz serves as what he estimates would be the equivalent of a major, in the 5th Givati Reserve Brigade. No one in his brigade, including De Paz, who is studying data science, imagined they would be urgently called in for duty on a Shabbat morning.

Still, he would nevertheless end up being among the first ones in the IDF to confront the gangs of Hamas killers that terrorized and murdered their way across Israel’s southern communities two weeks ago.

This is especially the case as a member of a reserve brigade, as opposed to a mandatorily enlisted soldier, where going to battle means leaving directly from your home, leaving your family behind.

“I remember I was in the living room and I heard the siren,” he said. “And I also have a friend, who, his job is in the south brigade of the Gaza Strip [periphery]. He called me during the alarm, and he said to me, ‘man, I have this major event in my area.”

Rocket sirens sounded in central Israeli cities on Thursday evening amid rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

Sirens sounded in Rishon Lezion, Holon, Bat Yam and Yavne, as well as in the southern city of Ashdod.

Jordan's Foreign Minister said on Thursday the country feared the worst was yet to come in the Gaza war, with no signs of a success in efforts to de-escalate.

In remarks at a press conference with his German counterpart, Ayman Safadi said the war would have "catastrophic repercussions" and urged "protecting the region from the danger of its expansion."

The Pentagon plans to send the two Iron Dome missile defense systems it had previously purchased from Israel back to that country to defend itself against inbound missiles, a US official and a congressional aide said.

The Department of Defense told members of Congress at a briefing on Wednesday it planned to lease the Iron Dome systems back to Israel, the US official and the congressional aide told Reuters. In this type of a financial arrangement, the ownership remains with the buyer.

The transfer back to Israel could come within days, the congressional aide said.

The IDF's apparatus for addressing the captivity of some 200 Israeli hostages in Gaza is strongly operational, despite much of the public coverage revolving around updating numbers and talking to families.

That means that critical intelligence which the apparatus, run by IDF Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon and Maj. Gen. (res.) Lior Carmi, collects gets passed on to IDF combat operations teams, the Shin Bet, and the Mossad for potential future rescue operations.

The number of estimated kidnapped persons is currently around 200 and the number of children in that group is slightly under 30.

Of those 200, the vast majority are with a high level of intelligence certainty, but there is a group with less clarity.

Some of the uncertainty revolves around bodies that still have not been identified and are undergoing DNA testing.

There are still some unrecovered bodies on both the Israeli and Gazan sides of the border, and since both Hamas terrorists and Israeli civilians were dressed like civilians, identification can be complex and take time.

The IDF said that it has gotten much better at speeding up both the identification process and the process for notifying families what it knows about.

There are also unusual cases where someone was videoed kidnapped, but later evidence showed they might have been killed on the way to Gaza, or might have succeeded in fleeing Hamas, but may not yet have reported to the IDF or their families.