The Times and the Independent report that there is little hope that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be solved in the near future. In a special report from Donald Macintyre in Gaza City, the Times reports that years of suffering show no sign of coming to an end as the irresistible force of the Israelis meets the immovable object of Hamas. The Independent reports that the hawkish Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman claimed the Palestinian terrorist group, which runs Gaza, is orchestrating clashes with Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers. Lieberman has ruled out an agreement with Hamas as he vowed to step up Israel’s response. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli soldiers during months of protests along the Gaza border. There have been missile attacks from the Palestinian side, with residents also firing incendiary balloons across a border fence into Israel. Speaking to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Lieberman said: “Wars are only conducted when there is no choice, and now there is no choice. “Anything less than the toughest response won’t help anymore. We have exhausted the other options. “There is no popular uprising. There is violence organized by Hamas.“ Fifteen thousand people don’t come by foot to the border at their own will. They come by bus and are paid.”

The Express reports that Defence Minister Lieberman has called for military action against Hamas. The call follows daily riots and violence along the security fence.

The Daily Mail reports that the Israeli military says it has struck several Hamas militant sites in Gaza following a rocket attack on southern Israel. The military says its jets struck eight military targets in three Hamas compounds in the Gaza Strip early on Thursday. The strikes were in response to an overnight Grad missile attack, the first firing from Gaza since a missile hit a house in the city of Beersheba a week ago, threatening to spark another full-fledged confrontation. Egypt and the UN are trying to mediate a long-term truce between Israel and Hamas. Israel and Hamas have fought three wars over the past decade. Tensions have been rising over the weekly border protests Hamas has organised to try to ease a crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade.

Yahoo news via AP reports that Israel’s military says a missile was fired from the Gaza Strip toward southern Israel, the first since a missile hit a house in the city of Beersheba a week ago. Air raid sirens blared in southern Israel late Wednesday after a week of relative calm. The military said in a statement early Thursday that an Iron Dome interceptor missile attempted to down the missile but failed. The rocket attack came as Egypt and the UN are trying to mediate a long-term truce between Israel and Hamas. The two sides came to the brink of all-out conflict over the summer amid weekly border protests organised by Hamas since March aimed in part at easing a crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade.

Yahoo news via AP reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Wednesday to maintain a permanent Israeli military force in the West Bank, saying that if it weren’t for Israeli troops stationed there Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would be “overrun in two minutes” by Hamas militants. Netanyahu told a major Jewish conference that Israel doesn’t have the liberty to repeat its mistake in Gaza, where Hamas violently seized control from Abbas after Israeli forces withdrew from the coastal strip. Asked about his vision for the West Bank, Netanyahu said he preferred to avoid labels such as “Palestinian state”. But he did make clear his view that Abbas, known by his nickname Abu Mazen, and his Palestinian Authority owe their very existence to Israel’s protection, and directly benefit from the presence of Israeli troops. “They’d be overrun in two minutes. A couple of years ago we uncovered a plot of 100 Hamas men to overthrow Abu Mazen. Overthrow? Kill him. Not kill him politically. Kill him. So, if we weren’t there, they’d not be there, which is exactly what happened when we left Gaza,” Netanyahu told an assembly of the Jewish Federation of North America.

The Daily Mail reports that China’s vice president and Israel’s prime minister on Wednesday co-hosted a high-profile trade and innovation conference, and toured an exhibition of Israeli technology start-ups together as the two countries worked to cement their fast-growing trade ties. A quarter century after establishing diplomatic relations, Israel and China have become important trade partners, with China emerging as an eager customer of Israeli technology. Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Chinese Government’s choice to send Wang Qishan, a close confidant of President Xi Jinping, to co-chair this year’s Israeli innovation summit “reflects the growing ties between our countries, our economies, our peoples”. Wang praised Israel as an innovation hub that China hopes to learn from as it modernises its fast-growing economy. “Israel leads the world in electronics, information technology, modern medicine, and agriculture,” he said. “China is still striving to achieve modernisation.”

The Sun and the BBC report Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmon’s reaction to Jamal Khashoggi’s death in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on 2 October. The Sun reports that bin Salman said the killers of Khashoggi would be brought to justice, in his first public comments on the murder. He told international investors at a major conference in Riyadh that the furore over Khashoggi’s killing would not derail the kingdom’s reform drive. He said: “We will prove to the world that the two governments (Saudi and Turkish) are cooperating to punish any criminal, any culprit and at the end justice will prevail.” The BBC reports that the Saudi crown prince has vowed to punish all the “culprits” responsible for the murder of Khashoggi. Bin Salman said “the crime was painful to all Saudis” but he would never allow any rift with Turkey.

The Express reports that despite many high profile individuals having dropped out of the Saudi’s conference, it still happened. Crown Prince bin Salman offered the nation’s neighbour, Qatar, rare praise as pressure continues to mount following the killing of Khashoggi. While speaking at the Future Investment Initiative conference, also known as ‘Davos in the Desert’, the Crown Prince spoke highly of the Qatari economy. He said: “Qatar, despite the differences we have, has a great economy and they will be doing a lot in the next five years.” He also pointed to the region’s economic potential and that the “new Europe would be here in the Middle East”.

The Guardian runs an op-ed by Owen Jones which says “that there is finally some scrutiny of Britain’s sordid relationship with one of the most abhorrent dictatorships on Earth. That it has taken the murder of a journalist – rather than, say, Saudi Arabia’s remorseless war in Yemen, now the world’s worst humanitarian crisis – is a travesty.”

The Financial Times publishes an op-ed by Philip Stephens that says “the spell over Saudi Arabia has been broken. Saudi Arabia has long enjoyed an immunity reaching far beyond normal diplomatic conventions. Vast oil riches, the cold war, the Iranian revolution and an appetite for expensive Western weapons systems have exempted it from normal rules of behaviour. The brutal, botched killing of Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul must surely have called time on this exceptionalism.”

The Israeli media includes a number of articles that report allegations by Prime Minister Netanyahu that a former Likud minister and coalition ministers are plotting to undermine him. Speaking at his 69^th birthday party in his office in Jerusalem, Netanyahu talked about the “plot of the century,” and dropped a bombshell. “For several weeks I have known that a former minister in the Likud has been talking with figures in the coalition and has been concocting a subversive ploy, in which I’ll deliver a sweeping victory to the Likud in the elections and then they’ll make sure that I won’t be prime minister, contrary to the will of the Likud voters, contrary to the will of the public, contrary to democracy,” said Netanyahu. He added: “I travel about Israel along with you and I see the tremendous support for us — me, my wife — support of a kind I can’t recall seeing ever since I went into politics. And that is why from the outset this was doomed to fail, because the public would never let anything like that happen. But it does expose a loophole in the law, and we will think about what to do with that.”

The majority of the media outlets are heavily critical of the Prime Minister. Sima Kadmon in Yediot Ahronot writes: “The idea that Gidon Saar, who is outside the Likud, would collaborate with the president to steal the premiership from Netanyahu is so groundless that it doesn’t even warrant discussion. There was not even a single person who said, either publicly or off-the-record, that he had heard anything about the plot that was supposedly concocted by Rivlin and Saar. Even Yariv Levin, the person closest to Netanyahu, admitted in a radio interview that he had never heard about that.”

Yossi Verter in Haaretz writes that “this is truly the type of story that is hard to deal with using rational tools because it is so obviously absurd. The thought that Rivlin, the No. 1 democrat in the country, would start a revolt against the will of the people in the elections and grant Saar the mandate to establish the next government, just because they are friends while Rivlin and Bibi are at each other’s throats, is more than paranoia. It is full psychosis. True insanity.” Verter adds that in a scenario in which the Attorney General publishes recommendations in the criminal investigations, “early elections are a two-edged sword. It would be better from Netanyahu’s perspective for him to stay in the job for as long as possible, arrive as prime minister at the hearing with the attorney general over filing an indictment, and try to reach a deal that would save him from prison in return for his retirement from political life. Not Rivlin and not Saar, the two demons, bother him at the moment, only the tidings that come from Mandelblit’s office – and maybe sooner than later.”

Defending Netanyahu, Matti Tuchfield in Israel Hayom writes,“The fact that you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not after you, goes the well-known adage. On the face of it, a scenario in which Rivlin assigns the task of forming the government onto someone other than Netanyahu appears groundless. In practice, it is definitely possible, and not even that hard. After all, it is obvious that if there is such a plot, it will be picked up in real time by the media, which will explain very sternly why Saar and not Netanyahu should be the one to form the government. Just as it explained why Sharon should trample underfoot a survey that was held among the Likud members about their positions prior to disengagement; just like it explained why Ehud Olmert could remain prime minister despite the Winograd report, and so on. Netanyahu knows that neither logic nor the will of the people make a difference [to the media], only its agenda. So why take the chance?”

Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post report the speech by Netanyahu at the General Assembly of Jewish Federations of North America yesterday in which he warned that he would unlikely be able to push through a compromise deal on Jewish conversion which had originally been proposed in order to avert a crisis with Diaspora Jewry. “I think it’s a good compromise, but I don’t know if I have the ability to pass it.” The Jerusalem Post focuses on a different part of the speech, in which Netanyahu said that he believed in a solution where the “Palestinians have all the powers to govern themselves and none of the powers to threaten us”.

Maariv reports on the Mayoral election in Tel Aviv where the gap between incumbent Ron Huldai and his deputy Asaf Zamir is down to is 3.5 per cent.

Haaretz reports that in a ‘message to Iran,’ the Chief of Staff of Azerbaijan is visiting Israel.

Israel Hayom reports that the Palestinian Authority has detained an Israeli Arab for allegedly selling land to Jews.