Israel has ramped up airstrikes across the Gaza Strip, reducing residential buildings to rubble and crushing families. Airstrikes have killed dozens at a time in leveled homes, according to witnesses.

The surging death toll foretells even greater loss of life ahead in Gaza, where Israeli forces are expected to launch a ground invasion seeking to destroy Hamas. Fuel shortages and the bombardment forced the shutdown of medical facilities, Gaza officials said.

Israeli strikes killed eight soldiers in southern Syria early Wednesday, Syrian state media reported, in what the Israeli army said was a response to earlier rocket fire.

The gas-rich nation of Qatar has become a key intermediary over the fate of some 200 hostages held by Hamas militants after their unprecedented attack on Israel, once again putting the small Arabian Peninsula country in the spotlight.

The negotiations have also thrust Qatar into a delicate international balancing act as it maintains a relationship with those viewed as militant groups by the West while trying to preserve its close security ties with the United States.

An Israeli 85-year-old freed by Palestinian militant group Hamas said Tuesday she "went through hell" during her abduction, but was treated well during more than two weeks held captive in Gaza.

Yocheved Lifshitz was a resident of Nir Oz kibbutz, one of the Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip which Hamas militants attacked on October 7.

Forty years after one of the deadliest attacks against U.S. troops in the Middle East, some warn that Washington could be sliding toward a new conflict in the region.

On Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide bomber hit an American military barracks at Beirut International Airport, killing 241 U.S. service members, most of them Marines – still the deadliest attack on Marines since the World War II Battle of Iwo Jima. A near-simultaneous attack on French forces killed 58 paratroopers.

French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking after meeting Israel's prime minister on Tuesday, proposed a coalition to fight terror groups in the region “that threaten all of us.”

He compared the proposal to the international coalition fighting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. He was referring to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran itself and the Houtis in Yemen, among others, saying they must not take the risk of opening a new front.

French President Emmanuel Macron was Tuesday set to become the first Western leader to meet both Israel's premier and the Palestinian president, more than two weeks into the brutal Gaza conflict that has claimed thousands of lives.

As Israel battles Gaza's Hamas after suffering the worst attack in its 75-year history, Macron visited to express solidarity but also to stress the need to protect Gaza's civilian population in the withering bombing campaign since.

The United States has accused Iran of "actively facilitating" attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East as it confirmed it had sent a small number of military advisors to Israel.

U.S. concerns have been rising about the potential for escalation of the war between Israel and Hamas militants, although Washington has rejected calls for a ceasefire as it says that ally Israel has a right to self-defense.

The Pentagon has sent military advisers, including a Marine Corps general versed in urban warfare, to Israel to aid in its war planning and is speeding multiple sophisticated air defense systems to the Middle East days ahead of an anticipated ground assault into Gaza.

One of the officers leading the assistance is Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Glynn, who previously helped lead special operations forces against the Islamic State and served in Fallujah, Iraq, during some of the most heated urban combat there, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss Glynn's role and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Israel escalated its bombardment of targets in the Gaza Strip, the military said Tuesday, ahead of an expected ground invasion against Hamas militants that the U.S. fears could spark a wider conflict in the region, including attacks on American troops.

The stepped-up attacks, and the rapidly rising death toll in Gaza, came as Hamas released two elderly Israeli women who were among the hundreds of hostages it captured during its devastating Oct. 7 attack on towns in southern Israel.