Members of Syria's small Christian community on the coast are living in fear after attacks killed more than 1,000 mostly Alawite civilians, with Christians reportedly caught up in the violence.

Syria's Druze minority has a long history of cutting their own path to survive among the country's powerhouses. They are now trying again to navigate a new, uncertain Syria since the fall of longtime autocrat Bashar Assad.

Members of the small religious sect find themselves caught between two forces that many of them distrust: the new, Islamist-led government in Damascus and Syria's hostile neighbor, Israel, which has used the plight of the Druze as a pretext to intervene in the country.

President Donald Trump 's Tuesday night address to a joint session of Congress highlighted several of the initiatives he's started in his first six weeks in office, but many of his comments included false and misleading information.

Here's a look at the facts.

Residents of southern Lebanon have been gradually returning to their villages to find their homes heavily damaged.

As they scour what remains, they are discovering that the battle-scarred walls of their houses served as a canvas for Israeli soldiers.

Hamas freed six Israelis on Saturday in the last scheduled release of living hostages by the militant group under the current stage of a ceasefire agreement with Israel.

In all, a total of 33 Israelis are being freed during this stage — including eight who are dead. Five Thai hostages have also been freed separately. Sixty-three hostages, including the body of a soldier held since 2014, remain in Gaza.

Ali Qashmar walked into his south Lebanon hometown on the Israeli border Tuesday to find bulldozed fields and piles of rubble where there used to be neighborhoods brimming with life.

"We came back to breathe the air of our lands and village, and we found our homes destroyed," said Qashmar, 74, from Odaisseh.

In a desolate area of Syria where Lebanese militant group Hezbollah once held sway, security forces shot open the gates to an abandoned building and found a defunct drug factory.

Syria's new authorities launched a security campaign last week around Qusayr at the porous Lebanese border, cracking down on drug and weapons smugglers.

U.S. President Donald Trump's plan to take over Gaza will imperil attempts to forge landmark ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel and fuel anti-American sentiment in the oil-rich kingdom, analysts said.

Trump's proposal to redevelop Gaza and oust the more than two million Palestinians living in the territory prompted a global backlash and enraged the Arab world, making it difficult for the Saudis to consider normalisation.

Gaza has long been a powder keg, and it exploded after Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing and abducting people, which sparked a crushing Israeli military operation that's only recently stopped under a tenuous ceasefire.

U.S. President Donald Trump's suggestion Tuesday that displaced Palestinians in Gaza be permanently resettled outside the war-torn territory and the U.S. take "ownership" of the land is triggering new tensions over the future of the enclave.

Palestinians will mark this year the 77th anniversary of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel, an event that is at the core of their national struggle.

But in many ways, that experience pales in comparison to the calamity now faced in the Gaza Strip — particularly as President Donald Trump has suggested that displaced Palestinians in Gaza be permanently resettled outside the war-torn territory and that the United States take "ownership" of the enclave.