On Friday, the Israeli military said two explosive-laden drones had targeted its forces in the Golan early the previous morning. Two officers from the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion were killed, it said, and 24 other soldiers were wounded.

Yet, the leaders of the three factions that are continuing to target Israel, as well as Iraqi officials, challenged the Israeli account and said they did not strike the Golan that day.

“Since October of last year, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has carried out more than 160 operations targeting the Israeli interior and the occupied areas in the Golan Heights."

“The resistance announces the operations it carries out as soon as they happen. The resistance did not announce this operation or claim responsibility for it as was reported,” he added. If we had carried it out, we would have announced it.”

Former US President Donald Trump has suggested that Israel attack Iran's nuclear facilities. The Republican presidential candidate was speaking at a campaign rally in the southern state of North Carolina on Friday.

One participant asked Trump about countermeasures against Iran's recent missile attack on Israel. Trump criticized President Joe Biden for voicing opposition to Israel targeting Iran's nuclear sites.

The former president said Biden "got that one wrong." He added that Biden's answer should have been, "Hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later."

US officials believe they can exploit the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah's disarray to push for the election of a president in Lebanon, according to Axios.

The report echoes the belief among some Lebanese opposition leaders who spoke to Middle East Eye that there is an opportunity to push for the election of a president after the post has been vacant since October 2022.

Under Lebanon's de facto confessional system, the president of Lebanon must be a Christian.

Airstrikes were launched on Friday at several parts of Yemen including its capital Sanaa and Hodeidah airport, Al Masirah TV, the main television news outlet run by the Houthi movement controlling much of Yemen, and residents said.

Strikes also targeted the south of Dhamar city, Al Masirah TV added.

Al Masirah TV reported that the strikes had been carried out by US and British forces, but a British government source said Britain was not involved.

Romal Ahmadi’s voice trembles when he recalls the day of the drone strike. “All my three children ran out of the house to welcome my older brother as he returned from work. I was sitting in the living room. They ran in the courtyard and the next thing I heard was a loud explosion.”

His children were Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Aayat, 2. All of them were killed on August 29, 2021 when an American hellfire missile struck the car in their courtyard. In total, seven children and three adults were killed.

The target of the U.S. strike was the oldest Ahmadi brother, Zemarai. The U.S. military tracked him for several hours that day via a drone after they observed him filling some containers. Ahmadi was employed with an American aid organization, distributing food in Afghanistan.

Every now and then he brought containers to his office to fill them up with potable water and bring them home. Then he made his way from his office back home, which was in the same direction as the Kabul Airport. When he reached his home, the drone operator fired the missile.

As Israel pounded northern Gaza with air strikes last October and ordered the evacuation of more than a million Palestinians from the area, a senior Pentagon official delivered a blunt warning to the White House.

The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel, Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, wrote in an Oct. 13 email to senior aides to President Joe Biden. Stroul was relaying an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone,” she wrote.

The emails reviewed by Reuters show a scramble inside the Biden administration to warn the White House of the impending crisis – and the White House’s initial resistance to a ceasefire in the early, chaotic days of war. The three sets of email exchanges began on Oct. 11, during Israel’s fifth day of air strikes after the Hamas incursion.

After Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza’s hospitals, schools and mosques, the U.S. State Department’s top public diplomacy official, Bill Russo, told senior State officials that Washington was “losing credibility among Arab-speaking audiences” by not directly addressing the humanitarian crisis, according to an Oct. 11 email.

Gaza’s health authorities reported that day a death toll of about 1,200. As Israel defended the strikes, saying Hamas was using civilian buildings for military purposes, Russo wrote that U.S. diplomats in the Middle East were monitoring Arab media reports that accused Israel of waging a “genocide” and Washington of complicity in war crimes.

“The U.S.’s lack of response on the humanitarian conditions for Palestinians is not only ineffective and counterproductive, but we are also being accused of being complicit to potential war crimes by remaining silent on Israel’s actions against civilians,” Russo wrote

Biden’s public comments on Gaza had largely given Netanyahu a free hand against Hamas. At the time, Biden faced only scattered protests from the left wing of the Democratic Party over his support for Israel's counterattack. Israel's likening of the Hamas assault to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington resonated widely in the U.S.

WASHINGTON/BEIRUT/JERUSALEM, Oct 4 (Reuters) - An Israeli strike on Friday near Lebanon's Masnaa border crossing with Syria cut off a road used by hundreds of thousands of people to flee Israeli bombardments in recent days, Lebanon Transport Minister Ali Hamieh told Reuters.

Hamieh said the strike hit inside Lebanese territory near the border crossing, creating a four-metre (12 feet) wide crater. An Israel Defence Forces (IDF) military spokesman had accused Iran-backed Lebanese armed group Hezbollah on Thursday of using the crossing to transport military equipment into Lebanon.

"The IDF will not allow the smuggling of these weapons and will not hesitate to act if forced to do so, as it has done throughout this war," IDF spokesman Avichay Adraee said on X.

According to Lebanese government statistics, more than 300,000 people - a vast majority of them Syrian - had crossed from Lebanon into Syria over the last 10 days to escape escalating Israeli bombardment.

Experts have asserted that this tactic is a gross violation of international law and that targeting civilian infrastructure, no matter the justification offered, is a war crime. Yet, Israeli authorities insist that it’s a legitimate tactic of war and helps deter future attacks on Israel by its enemies.rms and mosques.

Two years after the devastating 2006 campaign on Lebanon, the head of Israel’s northern command, Gadi Eisenkot, asserted that Israel will continue to use the strategy in future conflicts.

“What happened in [Dahiyeh]… will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,” he said. “We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.”

Of course, the most severe display of the Dahiyeh Doctrine has been during Israeli’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza. Since October 7, Israel’s apparent strategy of targeting Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure with the full force of the military to try and deter Hamas has brought a catastrophe comparable only to the Nakba of 1948. In just a year, Israel’s military completely devastated all infrastructural and institutional bases of Palestinian civilian life in Gaza.

The global majority is of course deeply critical of Israel’s assaults on civilian infrastructure in Gaza and Lebanon. Yet, Israel’s partners in the West continue to support these efforts both materially and ideologically. Even when Israeli authorities outrageously claim that they are “escalating” their war efforts – meaning killing and maiming civilians and making their environments inhabitable – to “de-escalate”, they nod in approval.

American Hajj Kamel Ahmad Jawad, from Dearborn, Michigan, was killed by an airstrike in Lebanon on Tuesday, according to a statement released by his family.

Jawad was staying in Nabatieh, which is in the south of the country but north of the Litani River, according to his family.

The statement said he was killed in an Israeli airstrike. While Israel has been striking Nabatieh, ABC News cannot independently verify the manner of his death.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who represents Dearborn, shared the statement on her Instagram. On X, she shared an article about Americans trying to evacuate Lebanon, saying one of her constituents there "was already killed in an Israeli airstrike."

Newly released footage shows Russian forces striking a Ukrainian town, using what pro-Kremlin sources have claimed is one of the most potent non-nuclear weapons in the world.

On Tuesday morning, videos began circulating on Russian and Ukrainian media of a "vacuum bomb" being dropped on the town of Vovchansk in the country's northeastern Kharkiv Oblast.

Ukrainian news agency InsiderUA posted the video to its Telegram channel, citing Russian military bloggers who said that the bomb was the ODAB-9000, a three-ton glide bomb sometimes referred to as "the father of all bombs."

A thermobaric or "vacuum" bomb draws in oxygen to generate intense, high-temperature combustions. According to the International Review of the Red Cross, an international law-focused academic journal produced by the humanitarian organization, the use of thermobaric weapons in built-up, civilian areas could constitute a war crime.

At least 78 individuals died this week after a boat capsized on Lake Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a local governor said.

Jean-Jacques Purusi, governor of the South Kivu province, spoke to The Associated Press after the incident. He reported that at least 78 people lost their lives but added that number could rise. Earlier in the day, witnesses estimated that at least 50 people had died and 10 survivors were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.

Witnesses also said the overcrowded boat sank just meters from the dock as it attempted to reach the port of Kituku. The vessel had been traveling from Minova, located in South Kivu province, to Goma in North Kivu province.

Local officials reported that rescue operations were ongoing, though the exact number of casualties remained uncertain. In a similar incident in February, most of the 50 passengers aboard a wooden boat were presumed dead after it capsized on Lake Kivu.

While speaking with a local radio station after the incident, Purusi said, "This boat was carrying about a hundred people when it had the capacity for about thirty passengers."

Meta is restricting the use of the upside-down red triangle emoji, a reference to Hamas combat operations that has become a broader symbol of Palestinian resistance, on its Facebook and Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms, according to internal content moderation materials reviewed by The Intercept.

Since the beginning of the Israeli assault on Gaza, Hamas has regularly released footage of its successful strikes on Israeli military positions with red triangles superimposed above targeted soldiers and armor. Since last fall, use of the red triangle emoji has expanded online, becoming a widely used icon for people expressing pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli sentiment. Social media users have included the shape in their posts, usernames, and profiles as a badge of solidarity and protest.

The symbol has become common enough that the Israeli military has used it as shorthand in its own propaganda: In November, Al Jazeera reported on an Israeli military video that warned “Our triangle is stronger than yours, Abu Obeida,” addressing Hamas’s spokesperson.