Middle East, Israel | featured news

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.

Israeli warplanes responded to rocket fire from Gaza on Monday by launching airstrikes, in a flare-up that began Sunday when Israel fired missiles against two suspected members of jihadist groups.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that a firm ultimatum to Iran is the only peaceful way to stop the regime in Tehran from getting atomic weapons, increasing pressure on President Obama weeks before the U.S. presidential election.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will make his case against Iran before the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, arguing that time is quickly running out to stop the Islamic Republic from becoming a nuclear power and the threat of force must be seriously considered.

President Barack Obama declared on Tuesday the United States will "do what we must" to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned against threatening attacks whose consequences would be devastating.