Gaza civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Basal told AFP that at least 20 were killed in a strike on a house in Al-Tuffah neighborhood, while a strike in Al-Shati refugee camp claimed the lives of four others. Against a grey backdrop of destruction, men used a donkey cart to remove...

Witnesses reported gunfire and artillery shelling near Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, where the civil defence agency said at least 13 people died in two separate strikes on a family home and on a commercial building. Al-Awda hospital in central Gaza said it received the bodies of "six martyrs...

The military said the soldiers were killed when the Namer armored vehicle they were travelling in exploded near Gaza's far-southern city of Rafah, where troops are engaged in fierce street battles. There was no immediate word on what triggered the blast.

Beirut, Lebanon -- Hezbollah said it fired a new wave of rockets and drones at the Israeli army on Thursday, after an Israeli strike killed one of its senior commanders. It was Hezbollah's largest simultaneous attack in near-daily cross-border fire between it and the Israeli army since its ally Hamas's October...

Doha, Qatar - Top US diplomat Antony Blinken said Wednesday that a truce and hostage release deal to end the Gaza war was still possible, wrapping up a Middle East tour as deadly fighting rocked the Palestinian territory. Lebanon's Iran-backed group Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, rained rockets on northern Israel, a...

Israel's army said Sunday that a senior commander had resigned over what he called his failure to prevent the October 7 attack by Palestinian fighters. "The commander of the 143rd Division, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld, informed his commanders today of his intention to end his service in the (Israeli army),"...

In a new diplomatic push, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Israel and key regional partners Egypt, Jordan and Qatar from Monday on his eighth Middle East trip since the war began, the State Department said.

Geneva, Switzerland -- The war in Gaza has seen the unemployment rate in the besieged Palestinian territory surge to nearly 80 percent, the United Nations said Friday. The UN's labour agency said the war between Hamas and Israel had "caused loss of jobs and livelihoods on a massive scale". Since the...

The hospital reported an electrical generator failure earlier in the night, which risked complicating the treatment of patients. Prior to the strike, the hospital had received at least 70 dead and more than 300 wounded since Tuesday, mostly women and children.

Hamas had told mediators it "cannot agree to a deal that doesn't that does not secure... a permanent ceasefire and the complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and the achievement of a serious, real captive exchange deal", he said.

Rafah, Palestinian Territories -- Hundreds braved roads in Rafah in south Gaza Tuesday as they fled Israel's expanding ground assault, with increased shelling, tanks in the city center, and forces positioned on higher ground. "We are panicking and afraid," 40-year-old Ihab Zorob of west Rafah told AFP. "Our children and wives...

Al-Qahera News, which has links to Egyptian intelligence, quoted a defence official as saying an initial probe of the shooting incident indicated that Israeli troops and Palestinian fighters had exchanged fire, "which led to shooting in several directions".

Rocket sirens blared in Tel Aviv for the first time in months, with an AFP correspondent reported hearing at least three blasts. Israel's offensive has killed at least 35,984 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry.

Palestinian Territories - Israel launched devastating air strikes on Gaza Thursday, while also expressing readiness to resume stalled talks on a truce and hostage release deal with Hamas to pause the war raging since October 7. The Gaza Strip's civil defence agency said two pre-dawn air strikes had killed 26...

Soldiers are present in the hospital's courtyard and in nearby houses," said hospital's acting director, Dr Mohammad Saleh, adding that there was "continuous gunfire and shelling" towards it. Troops stormed the hospital building on Wednesday evening, he said.

Beirut, Lebanon -- A third of Lebanese people are impoverished with poverty rates tripling in a decade, the World Bank said Thursday, as the country grapples with years of economic meltdown and war in the south. One in every three Lebanese "was poverty-stricken in 2022," the World Bank said in a...

Washington, United States - Amal Clooney helped the International Criminal Court weigh evidence that led to the decision to seek arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders, the human rights lawyer said Monday. The high-profile British-Lebanese barrister posted a statement on the website of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which she founded...

Fighting has flared in north Gaza four months after the army said Hamas's command structure there had been dismantled, and six months after Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Hamas had "lost control" of the Palestinian territory.

The city on the Egyptian border had been sheltering 1.4 million Palestinians, according to the United Nations, but Israel's military operation sparked an exodus of nearly 360,000 people from Rafah so far, said the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).

Popplewell was kidnapped from his home during Hamas's October 7 attack along with his mother, Hanna Peri, who was released during a one-week truce in November -- the only pause so far in more than seven months of war. Popplewell's older brother was killed in the attack.

In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Biden warned he would stop some US weapons supplies to Israel if it carried out its long-threatened ground assault. Israel on Thursday called Biden's comments "very disappointing". Biden told CNN: "If they go into Rafah, I'm not supplying the weapons that have been...

Rafah, Palestinian Territories - Displaced Gazan Marwan al-Masri, sheltering in Rafah, said on Wednesday "life has completely ceased" since Israeli tanks and troops entered the city's east, sending desperate Palestinians fleeing north in the besieged territory. More than 1.4 million people had crammed into Rafah, a city on the Gaza Strip's...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said the proposal "is far from Israel's essential demands", but the government will send negotiators for talks.

The evacuation call followed disagreement between Israel and Hamas over the Palestinian group's demands to end the seven-month war, during weekend negotiations in Cairo. Egyptian state-linked media said the talks stalled after a rocket attack claimed by Hamas killed four Israeli soldiers on Sunday.

A Hamas official said the group would respond "within a very short period" to a plan proposed by mediators to halt the fighting for 40 days and to exchange dozens of hostages for many more Palestinian captives. But the group's aim remains an "end to this war", senior Hamas official...

And the danger for clearance work is restricted not just to unexploded ordnance but includes possible exposure to toxic substances such as asbestos. The United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) estimated the amount of debris in Gaza at 37 million tons in mid-April, or 300 kgs per square meter.

Earlier on Monday, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters he would encourage Arab leaders to put forward their proposal for a two-state solution and that he wanted EU member states to invite Arab leaders to Brussels to present it.

Egypt, Qatar and the United States have been trying to mediate a new truce ever since a one-week halt to the fighting in November saw 80 Israeli hostages exchanged for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Protesters within Israel are demanding that the government secure freedom for other hostages.

Israeli forces are carrying out "offensive action" across southern Lebanon, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Wednesday without specifying whether ground troops had crossed the border. He also claimed that "half of Hizbollah's commanders in southern Lebanon have been eliminated" in months of violence.

Hizbollah fighters fired "dozens of Katyusha rockets" at northern Israel "as part of the response to the Israeli enemy's attacks on... civilian homes, specifically the horrific massacre in Hanin and the killing and injuring of civilians," the group said in a statement.

Iran downplayed Israel's reported retaliation for its unprecedented drone and missile attack, tamping down fears that escalating attacks between the arch enemies could tip over into a broader war in the Middle East. However a deadly blast at an Iraqi military base underlined the persisting tensions in the region.

If the Gaza war raging since October 7 has created tough challenges for Jordan, it now faces the additional threat of being stuck in the middle of a widening Israel-Iran conflict.

The West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, has seen a surge in violence since early last year, particularly since the Israel-Hamas war erupted in Gaza on October 7. At least 468 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers across the West Bank since October 7, according...

Iran's attack came in retaliation for an April 1 strike that levelled the five-storey consular annexe of the Iranian embassy in Damascus and killed seven Revolutionary Guards, two of them generals. Tehran has since vowed to avenge the strike which was widely blamed on Israel.

As expected, Iran retaliated early Sunday by firing more than 200 drones and missiles toward Israel in response to Israel's covert attack of Iran's diplomatic office in Damascus that killed nine people.

"Our enemies think that they can pull apart Israel and the United States, but the opposite is true -- they are bringing us together," Gallant said, after the two discussed Iran's threats of retaliation for a deadly air strike on its consulate in Syria.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned Wednesday that Israel "must be punished and will be punished", days after one of his advisers said Israeli embassies are "no longer safe". Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz swiftly replied on social media site X that "if Iran attacks from its territory, Israel...

The strike came as talks in Cairo aimed at a ceasefire and a hostage release deal dragged on without signs of a breakthrough. Speaking to Al Jazeera, Haniyeh, who is based in Qatar, suggested the strike was an attempt to shift Hamas's negotiating stance, but insisted it would not work.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he had no indication of an "imminent" Israeli assault on the city, the last in the Gaza Strip yet to be the target of a ground invasion and where around 1.5 million Palestinians are sheltering.

Organizers said about 100,000 people converged at a Tel Aviv crossroads renamed "Democracy Square" since mass protests against controversial judicial reforms last year. Chanting "elections now", protesters called for his resignation as the war in Gaza enters its seventh month on Sunday, AFP correspondents reported.

According to a report in magazine +972, Israel has used AI to identify targets in Gaza -- in some cases with as little as 20 seconds of human oversight. Guterres said that he was "deeply troubled by reports that the Israeli military's bombing campaign includes Artificial Intelligence as a tool...

Tehran, Iran--Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei mourned Thursday the seven Revolutionary Guards killed in a strike in Syria, which he has blamed on Israel and has vowed to "punish", state media reported. The Guards, including two generals, were killed in the air strike on Monday which levelled the Iranian...

Israel has declined to comment on the Damascus strike but analysts saw it as an escalation of Israel's campaign against Iran's regional proxies that runs the risk of triggering a wider war. Among the dead were seven Iranian Revolutionary Guards, two of them generals.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said deadly attacks on humanitarian staff showed either deliberate intent or reckless incompetence, and called for a change in how the war is being conducted. The medical charity added that children were turning up in hospitals with gunshot wounds from drones.

"If it is true that the convoy was deliberately attacked because it was supposed to contain a terrorist, and that civilian lives were therefore sacrificed, I do not know of any (political) system in which this would be justified," he told Polish public radio Trojka.

Former premier Barak said if Netanyahu launches a ground offensive on Rafah, the "hostages will return in coffins. The one who abandoned them on October 7 is now sacrificing them on the altar of absolute victory." He called for snap elections, saying "the man responsible" for the calamity should be...

The World Bank said in its interim damage assessment, this is equivalent to 97 percent of the combined economic output of the West Bank and Gaza in 2022. The report, produced with the United Nations and the European Union, found structural damage affected "every sector of the economy."

In a statement, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani "strongly condemned" the attack and said that Iran "reserves the right to carry out a reaction and will decide on the type of response and the punishment of the aggressor." Iran's ambassador in Damascus, Hossein Akbari, said, "the five-storey consulate building...

According to the health ministry in Gaza, the bodies of four foreign aid workers and their Palestinian driver were brought to a hospital in the town of Deir el-Balah after an Israeli strike targeted their vehicle. Hamas said the aid workers included "British, Australian and Polish nationalities, with the fourth...

After Paris, Blinken will head to Brussels for NATO foreign ministers' talks ahead of the alliance's 75th anniversary summit in Washington. Blinken will also hold a three-way meeting in Brussels with EU leaders and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who has been seeking to branch out from his country's historic...