Israel | featured news

An Obama aide says the U.S. and Israel both want an end to the rocket fire that's coming from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

Israel continued its aerial assault on targets in the Hamas-ruled Gaza strip early Saturday, launching 200 airstrikes aimed at smuggling tunnels under the enclave's border with Egypt and what the Israeli military said were four Hamas buildings, including the group's headquarters, a police station and a commander's house. Witnesses reported that the offices of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh were destroyed.

Palestinian militants for the first time targeted the holy city of Jerusalem on Friday with rocket fire as Israel and the Islamist group Hamas inched closer to all-out war.

The head of the military wing of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas has been killed during Israeli air and naval strikes in the Gaza Strip. Ahmed Said Khalil al-Jabari and another Hamas official died when the car they were in was hit in Gaza City. It follows a wave of rocket attacks against Israel from the territory.

Israel faced the prospect of stepped-up military action on two fronts Monday as rockets fired from Gaza hit southern communities for the third straight day, and the army said it shelled a Syrian artillery battery after a stray shell landed near one of its posts in the Golan Heights.

For a second consecutive day, Israel confronted fire along its border with Syria on Monday as the Israeli army said it fired shells toward the source of a mortar shell, hitting Syrian artillery units.

Lifting a nearly 25-year veil of secrecy, Israel has admitted that it killed the deputy of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in a 1988 raid in Tunis.

Israel says its blockade is intended to stem arms smuggling, but activists say the embargo is a collective punishment of civilians.

When they left their village north of Cairo on August 27, Ahmed Waguih and Bahaa Zaqzouq told their families they were going on holiday. A few weeks later and hundreds of miles away, the cousins were killed mounting a cross-border raid into Israel.

The address mostly repackaged things Romney has said before, sometimes with greater precision. The Republican, who has stumbled in past efforts to articulate his foreign policy, offered few specific ways he would change the Obama administration’s current approach. Although he made broad critiques of Obama’s “passivity,” Romney did not call for any new armed intervention in any Mideast conflict.