One day in the fall of 1998, Shivi Drori, a young farmer fresh out of the Israeli army, brought three trailers to a rugged hilltop deep in the occupied West Bank and began to plant raspberries.

It was an unauthorized settlement in the heart of territory claimed by the Palestinians, but Drori, now 49, said he considered himself to be "in a way, working with the government."

Israel's far-right government has granted approval for over 7,000 new homes in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, settlement backers and opponents said. The move defies growing international opposition to construction in the occupied territory.

The announcement came just days after the U.N. Security Council passed a statement strongly criticizing Israeli settlement construction on occupied lands claimed by the Palestinians. The United States, Israel's closest ally, blocked what would have been an even tougher legally binding resolution, with diplomats saying they had received Israeli assurances of refraining from unilateral acts for six months.

The death toll from the massive earthquake that hit parts of Turkey and Syria on Feb. 6 continues to rise as more bodies are retrieved from the rubble of demolished buildings. A magnitude 6.4 earthquake that struck the already battered province of Hatay this week damaged or demolished more buildings, compounding the devastation.

Here's a look at the key developments Thursday from the aftermath of the earthquake.

The deaths of 11 Palestinians in an Israeli raid in the West Bank comes a year into a spiral of violence that has killed over 250 Palestinians and 35 Israelis in the past 12 months.

AFP looks back at some of the deadliest incidents since a spate of attacks in Israel in spring last year prompted authorities to launch a series of ever deadlier "counter-terrorism" raids.

The northern West Bank city of Nablus, the Palestinian commercial center, resembled a war zone on Wednesday, after a daytime Israeli military raid triggered a firefight that killed at least 10 Palestinians and wounded more than 100 others.

It was the latest bloody escalation in a monthslong surge of Israeli raids into the the occupied territory that has led to the deaths of some 200 Palestinians and the arrest of at least 2,600 others. Last month, a similarly deadly raid in the northern West Bank city of Jenin triggered a Palestinian attack outside a synagogue in Jerusalem and a burst of rocket fire from Gaza.

Ahmed Qureia, a former Palestinian prime minister and one of the architects of interim peace deals with Israel, has died at age 85.

A key player in the 1993 Oslo peace accords, Qureia witnessed the rise of the dream of Palestinian statehood that surged during the negotiations. But he also saw those hopes recede, with the prospect of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drifting further than ever. Domestically, Qureia was riddled with corruption charges that tainted his reputation.

The Islamic State group has carried out its deadliest attacks in more than a year, killing dozens of civilians and security officers in the deserts of central Syria, even as people of northern Syria have been digging out of the wreckage from the region's devastating earthquake.

The bloodshed was a reminder of the persistent threat from IS, whose sleeper cells still terrorize populations nearly four years after the group was defeated in Syria.

Palestinian militants in Gaza launched rockets at southern Israel and Israeli aircraft struck targets in the coastal enclave early Thursday after a deadly gun battle with Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank killed 10 Palestinians.

The bloodshed extends one of the deadliest periods in years between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, where dozens of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the start of the year. Palestinian attacks on Israelis in 2023 have killed 11 people.

Demolition teams are clearing mounds of rubble from the devastating Feb. 6 earthquake in Turkey and Syria, as emergency responders scramble to shelter survivors — who were traumatized anew by Monday's magnitude 6.4 earthquake in Turkey's already badly battered province of Hatay.

That quake killed eight people in Turkey and Syria and demolished or damaged more buildings, leaving countless homeless. The combined death toll from the Feb. 6 earthquake in both countries stands at around 46,000 — the vast majority in Turkey.

Israel's parliament advanced a bill Wednesday that would enable lawmakers to overturn a Supreme Court decision with a simple majority, a law that critics say would severely erode the country's democratic checks and balances.

The "Supreme Court override" bill's approval in a preliminary vote in the Knesset was the latest step by Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling coalition toward realizing the judicial overhaul that is steaming ahead despite calls for dialogue and consensus from American Jews and Israel's president, and weekly protest by tens of thousands of Israelis.