Hassan Alik, fleeing escalating violence in the Israel-Hezbollah war, left Lebanon on Saturday aboard a ship to avoid Beirut's airport, which he feared "could be bombed" at any moment.

After months of disappointment, U.S. President Joe Biden's administration sees new hope for reaching a Gaza ceasefire after Israel killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, but the upcoming U.S. elections cast a shadow on prospects for a breakthrough.

Israel's killing of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas' top leader and the mastermind of the group's Oct. 7 attack, is a dramatic turning point in the brutal yearlong war that it touched off.

Sinwar's killing on Thursday decapitates the Palestinian militant group that has already been reeling from months of assassinations up and down its ranks. And it is a potent symbolic achievement for Israel in its battle to destroy Hamas.

Yahya Sinwar masterminded an attack on Israel that shocked the world, unleashing a still-widening catastrophe with no end in sight.

In Gaza, no figure loomed larger in determining the war's trajectory than the 61-year-old Hamas leader. Obsessive, disciplined and dictatorial, he was a rarely seen veteran militant who learned Hebrew over years spent in Israeli prisons and who carefully studied his enemy.

Shaban al-Dalu was sleeping in his tent in a central Gaza hospital's courtyard, still recuperating from wounds from an Israeli strike on a mosque a week earlier, when a new strike hit, setting off an inferno.

The 19-year-old university student and his 38-year-old mother, Alaa al-Dalu, were among five people killed as the blaze ripped through a tent camp sheltering hundreds of Palestinian families in the courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah. Dozens of others, including children, were severely burned.

By Jasmin Lilian Diab, Lebanese American University

The escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah since September 2024, and Israel's bombing of civilian areas across Lebanon, have unleashed a profound humanitarian disaster.

One of the worst mass casualty strikes on Israel in a year of war came not from dozens of Iranian ballistic missiles nor the repeated barrages of rocket fire launched by Hamas and Hezbollah. Instead, it was a single drone.

The unmanned aerial vehicle, laden with explosives, evaded Israel's multilayered air-defense system and slammed into a mess hall at a military training camp deep inside Israel, killing four soldiers and wounding dozens.

As the war between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah escalates, a United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon is increasingly in the crosshairs, with Israeli troops firing at the peacekeepers' headquarters and positions several times in the past week.

The peacekeepers belong to the 10,000-strong United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, who have been patrolling the border area between Lebanon and Israel for nearly 50 years.

Lebanese Christian Joseph Jarjour was hoping for a peaceful retirement at home in south Lebanon, but has instead found himself caught in the crossfire of the Israel-Hezbollah war.

"We're trapped," said the 68-year-old retired teacher in the southern village of Rmeish, around two kilometers (one mile) from the Israeli border.

Rescue workers searched through the rubble of a collapsed building in central Beirut on Friday morning, hours after two Israeli strikes hit the Lebanese capital, killing at least 22 people and wounding dozens.

The air raid was the deadliest attack on central Beirut in over a year of war, hitting two residential buildings in neighborhoods that have swelled with displaced people fleeing Israeli bombardment elsewhere in the country.