Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Gazans to stay out of harm's way and move to safer areas, blaming every civilian casualty on Hamas
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Tuesday's airstrikes in Gaza are only the beginning and that all ceasefire negotiations will take place under fire. In a recorded statement broadcast on national television, Netanyahu said Israel would press ahead until it realises all of its war goals -- destroying Hamas and freeing all hostages held by the militant group. The previous releases proved that military pressure is a necessary condition for freeing hostages, he said.
The Israeli military confirmed that its air force successfully intercepted the missile before it entered Israeli airspace
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Israel has resumed large-scale airstrikes on Gaza, causing widespread devastation. With political and military motivations at play, what's driving this renewed offensive
Israel carried out airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, southern Lebanon and southern Syria on Monday, killing at least 10 people, including a child, according to local authorities. The Israeli military said it was targeting militants plotting attacks. The airstrikes were the latest in what have been frequent and often deadly attacks by Israeli forces during the fragile ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon. Israel has blocked all food, medicine, fuel and other supplies from entering Gaza the past two weeks, demanding Hamas accept changes in the two sides' ceasefire deal. In Syria, Israel seized a zone in the south after the fall of longtime autocrat Bashar Assad in December. Israel says it is a preemptive security measure against the former Islamist insurgents who now run Syria, though their transitional government has not expressed threats against Israel. The strikes hit a residential area in the southern Syrian city of Daraa, killing three people and wounding 19 others, including four children
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Hamas said Saturday it would only release an American-Israeli and the bodies of four other hostages if Israel implements the existing ceasefire agreement in the Gaza Strip, calling it an exceptional deal aimed at getting the truce back on track. A senior Hamas official said long-delayed talks over the ceasefire's second phase would need to begin the day of the release and last no longer than 50 days. Israel would also need to stop barring the entry of humanitarian aid and withdraw from a strategic corridor along Gaza's border with Egypt. Hamas would also demand the release of more Palestinian prisoners in exchange for hostages, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks. Edan Alexander, 21, who grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey, was abducted from his military base during Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war, and is the last living American citizen held in Gaza. Israel has cast doubt on Hamas' offer There was no immediate commen
The fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad's government has aggravated already tense relations between Turkiye and Israel, with their conflicting interests in Syria pushing the relationship toward a possible collision course. Turkiye, which long backed groups opposed to Assad, has emerged as a key player in Syria and is advocating for a stable and united Syria, in which a central government maintains authority over the whole country. It welcomed a breakthrough agreement that Syria's new interim government signed this week with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, to integrate with the Syrian government and army. Israel, on the other hand, remains deeply suspicious of Syria's interim president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, pointing to his roots in al-Qaida. It's also wary of Turkiye's influence over Damascus and appears to want to see Syria remain fragmented after the country under Assad was turned into a staging ground for its archenemy, Iran, and Tehran's proxies. Syria has become
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The US and Israel have reached out to officials of three East African governments to discuss using their territories as potential destinations for resettling Palestinians uprooted from the Gaza Strip under President Donald Trump's proposed postwar plan, American and Israeli officials say. The contacts with Sudan, Somalia and the breakaway region of Somalia known as Somaliland reflect the determination by the US and Israel to press ahead with a plan that has been widely condemned and raised serious legal and moral issues. Because all three places are poor, and in some cases wracked by violence, the proposal also casts doubt on Trump's stated goal of resettling Gaza's Palestinians in a beautiful area. Officials from Sudan said they have rejected overtures from the US, while officials from Somalia and Somaliland told The Associated Press that they were not aware of any contacts. Under Trump's plan, Gaza's more than 2 million people would be permanently sent elsewhere. He has proposed t
United Nations-backed human rights experts on Thursday accused Israel of "the systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other gender-based violence" in its war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The allegations came in one of the most extensive reports of its kind on the issue since Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel ignited the war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the Human Rights Council, a UN-backed body that commissioned the team of independent experts, as an "anti-Israel circus" that "has long been exposed as an antisemitic, rotten, terrorist-supporting, and irrelevant body". His statement did not address the findings themselves. The findings by the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which seeks to document in minute detail the allegations and evidence of crimes to bolster accountability for perpetrators, could be used by prosecutors at the International Criminal Court or in other jurisdictions to try to bring justice
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Iranian state television showed Emirati official Anwar Gargash meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Tehran, Iran's capital
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Gaza ceasefire negotiations are expected to continue in Qatar with Hamas pushing for Phase II, while Israel wants to extend Phase 1
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Syria's Druze minority has a long history of cutting their own path to survive among the country's powerhouses. They are now trying again to navigate a new, uncertain Syria since the fall of longtime autocrat Bashar Assad. Members of the small religious sect find themselves caught between two forces that many of them distrust: the new, Islamist-led government in Damascus and Syria's hostile neighbor, Israel, which has used the plight of the Druze as a pretext to intervene in the country. Syria's many religious and ethnic communities are worried over their place in the new system. The transitional government has promised to include them, but has so far kept authority in the hands of the Islamist former insurgents who toppled Assad in December -- Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS. That and HTS's past affiliation with Sunni Muslim extremist al-Qaida, has minorities suspicious. The most explosive hostilities have been with the Alawite religious minority, to which Assad's family belongs. Hea
The move follows Israel's decision last week to block all aid to the war-torn enclave, a step similar of its earlier measures at the onset of the conflict, when it declared a 'siege' on Gaza