Just three weeks into the deadliest war between Israel and Hamas, it already is clear that the bloodshed has flipped long-standing assumptions in Israel and the region upside down.

Israel's military and intelligence services were exposed as incompetent and ill-prepared. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decades of attempts to sideline the Palestinians and U.S. efforts to manage the conflict, rather than solve it, badly backfired.

"Stop the bombs and save lives!" the Palestinian ambassador pleaded at an emotional U.N. meeting Thursday on the war in Gaza. But Israel's envoy was adamant, declaring again, "We will not rest until Hamas is obliterated."

The war sparked by Gaza's Hamas rulers' surprise attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 played out in the vast hall of the 193-nation General Assembly, where Arab nations expected to adopt a resolution Friday calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza after the Security Council's four failed attempts to agree on any action.

More than two weeks after Hamas militants rampaged through a string of sleepy farming towns, many Israelis are furious at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, not just for failing to prevent the attack, but for failing to come to their aid afterward.

While the military is launching unrelenting airstrikes in Gaza that have killed thousands of Palestinians, and hundreds of thousands of Israeli troops are massing for a possible ground offensive, government infighting and lack of help for those in need have left traumatized survivors to mourn on their own and volunteers — many of whom spent the past year protesting the government — to take on recovery efforts.

A senior Hamas official has told The Associated Press that the Palestinian militant group had expected stronger intervention from Hezbollah in its war with Israel, in a rare public appeal to its allies in the region.

Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas' decision-making political bureau, said in an interview that "we need more" from allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, in light of an Israeli air campaign that Palestinian health officials say has killed more than 7,000 people, mostly civilians, in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Six people were lightly injured when an "unidentified drone fell" on an Egyptian town on the border with Israel on Friday, the army said.

The army spokesman said the drone crashed into "a building next to Taba hospital", in the Red Sea town of the same name, across the border from the Israeli resort of Eilat.

U.S. fighter jets launched airstrikes early Friday on two locations in eastern Syria linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pentagon said, in retaliation for a slew of drone and missile attacks against U.S. bases and personnel in the region that began early last week.

The U.S. strikes reflect the Biden administration's determination to maintain a delicate balance. The U.S. wants to hit Iranian-backed groups suspected of targeting the U.S. as strongly as possible to deter future aggression, possibly fueled by Israel's war against Hamas, while also working to avoid inflaming the region and provoking a wider conflict.

Israeli forces backed by fighter jets and drones carried out a second ground raid into Gaza in as many days and struck targets on the outskirts of Gaza City, the military said Friday, as it prepares for a widely expected ground invasion of the Hamas-ruled territory.

U.S. warplanes meanwhile struck targets in eastern Syria that the Pentagon said were linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard after a string of attacks on U.S. forces by Iran-backed fighters, adding to the already high regional tensions fueled by the three-week-old Gaza war.

Ten fighters from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) were killed, Iraqi Kurdish authorities said Thursday, as Turkey said it launched renewed air strikes on northern Iraq.

Turkey has intensified its cross-border air raids against Kurdish targets in northeastern Syria and northern Iraq in retaliation for an October 1 suicide bombing in Ankara which injured two policemen.

Douglas Macgregor --a retired U.S. Army colonel and a former senior adviser at the Pentagon -- has said that U.S. and Israeli special forced had recently gone into Gaza where they were “shot to pieces.”

“Some of our special ops forces and Israeli special ops forces went into Gaza to reconnoiter, to plan for where they might want to go to free hostages and make an impact and they were shot to pieces and took heavy losses, as I understand,” Macgregor said in an interview with U.S. far-right media personality Tucker Carlson.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he will be held accountable for the shocking October 7 attack by Hamas militants, but that will only come after Israel’s war against the militant group.

In a nationally televised address Wednesday night, Netanyahu said he was busy plotting a ground invasion of Gaza, though he refused to say when that might happen. He also expressed sorrow over the attack, which allegedly killed more than 1,400 Israelis and saw over 200 others taken captive in Gaza.