Middle East

The families of several Israeli hostages held in Gaza issued a sharply worded televised statement on Saturday in which they called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to seize the moment after this week’s killing of the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, to reach a hostage and cease-fire deal to …

The killing of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader whose decision to attack Israel more than a year ago set off the ever-widening war tearing up the Middle East, could be the key to ending the bloodshed. Now that Israel has decapitated Hamas in Gaza, the thinking goes, it might be …

Israeli bombs have blown up its munitions stores and killed thousands of its fighters, including many seasoned commanders. And yet, Hezbollah keeps fighting. Since Israel invaded southern Lebanon nearly three weeks ago, its forces have confronted a flexible enemy that uses the environment to launch complex and sometimes deadly operations. …

Iraqi regulators have suspended the license of a Saudi-owned television channel and are taking steps to terminate its right to operate in Iraq after the channel aired a report describing former leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s Quds Force as “faces of terrorism.” The suspension of the channel, MBC Media …

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said on Saturday that the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon was “far too high” and that he would “like to see Israel scale back some of the strikes it’s taking, especially in and around Beirut.” Mr. Austin is the most senior U.S. official …

A quarter-century before Israel was founded, the Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky articulated an idea that has come to define the way Israelis protect their country. A Jewish state, he wrote in 1923, would succeed only by projecting enough strength to force its enemies to accept it as a permanent reality. …

At the end, the fearsome militant leader who had helped unleash a vicious war seemed barely a threat. In video captured by an Israeli drone, a man sat alone, badly wounded and caked in dust amid the ruins of a building in the Gaza Strip, wrapped in a kaffiyeh and …

Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip killed Palestinians in a tent encampment on the grounds of a hospital and in a school turned shelter, according to residents and U.N. officials, as deadly fighting also raged between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Survivors of the strike at the hospital complex in …

This was not the first time that displaced Gazans camping on the grounds of Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital awoke to Israeli strikes on the place where they were trying to find safety. But Monday’s strike overshadowed any they had survived before: flames jumping from tent to tent, shrieks of agony …

The advanced THAAD air defense system that the United States is sending to Israel is a sign of how both countries are bracing for more attacks against Israel by Iran and its allies. It adds another layer of protection to the several types of air defense systems that Israel already …