Israel and the Palestinians battled each other for a third day on Saturday with rockets fired from Gaza wounding three in southern Israel while Israeli planes attacked the coastal enclave in the early hours.
In a tragic irony, the casualties from Saturday's early-morning rocket fire on the southern Israeli city of Ashdod were all illegal Palestinian workers, sleeping rough.
Full StoryEgypt has decided to withdraw its ambassador to Israel to protest the deaths of five policemen killed on the border during retaliatory attacks on Palestinian militants, state television said Saturday.
"Egypt has decided to withdraw its ambassador to Israel until there is an official apology," it said. Egypt's military chief of staff, Sami Enan, headed to the Sinai on Friday to probe the deaths of the policemen killed a day earlier.
Full StoryOne of the four Hizbullah members accused of involvement in ex-Premier Rafik Hariri’s assassination has said that the Lebanese authorities would have arrested him if they wanted to.
"I don't care about the indictments. Let them come to arrest me," the man told TIME in an exclusive interview, which he gave on condition of anonymity despite having been publicly named by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon among the four suspects.
Full StoryLebanon, the Arab member of the U.N. Security Council, on Friday blocked a statement which would have called deadly attacks in southern Israel terrorism, diplomats said.
The move brought criticism from the United States which said the terrorism label is a "standard" Security Council description after such an attack.
Full StoryAccounts of the attacks that killed eight Israelis near the border with Egypt on Thursday paint a picture of an operation carefully planned and executed.
The triple attacks, attributed by Israel to radical Palestinian activists from the Gaza Strip, took the army and police by surprise, judging by the ensuing confusion and inaccuracy of initial reports.
Full StoryGaza militants blamed for shooting attacks near the Egyptian border that killed eight Israelis, denied Friday that they were involved, as the hunt for the killers moved to Egypt.
"We salute (the operation) and we are proud of it, but we do not claim it," Popular Resistance Committees spokesman Abu Mujahid told Agence France Presse in the Gaza city of Rafah as the faction buried five members killed in a retaliatory Israeli air strike a day earlier.
Full StoryEgyptian state television said on Friday two unknown Egyptians were killed along with three policemen by Israeli gunfire the previous day when Israeli forces were tracking down militants behind deadly attacks in their territory.
Security officials had said that three policemen were killed on Thursday when an Israeli Apache gunship fired a rocket at militants it was pursuing along the border, after attacks on Israeli buses and cars killed eight.
Full StoryGaza militants on Friday fired 12 rockets into Israel, seriously injuring one person after a night of Israeli air strikes which killed a teenager and hurt 17 other people.
Most of them caused no injuries or damage but two struck the southern coastal town of Ashdod on Friday morning, damaging a school and a synagogue and seriously wounding two Israelis, one seriously, Israeli police and the military said.
Full StoryAn Israeli air strike on the southern Gaza town of Rafah killed six people on Thursday, Palestinian medics said, just hours after a string of deadly attacks in southern Israel.
Israeli military sources confirmed that air strikes were carried out in Gaza shortly after three attacks in southern Israel killed at least seven people.
Full StorySeven Israelis were killed in a string of coordinated attacks in southern Israel Thursday, and hours later the Israeli military hit back with angry air raids on Gaza militants it said were responsible.
The bloodshed, which killed six civilians and a soldier on two desert roads near the Red Sea resort town of Eilat, prompted a wave of international condemnation led by the White House.
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