Israel, Syria | featured news

Syrian government forces have used chemical weapons - probably nerve gas - in their fight against rebels waging a two-year-old uprising, the Israeli military's top intelligence analyst said on Tuesday.

Shouting condemnation and promises of retaliation, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah condemned Israel's decision to send warplanes into Syria, calling its airstrike a day before "inhuman" and "barbaric."

Israel voiced doubt on Tuesday about the accuracy of Syrian activists' reports that chemical weapons had been used against rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

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.

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.

A Syrian site bombed by Israel in 2007 was "very likely" to have been a nuclear reactor which should have been declared, the U.N. atomic agency said in a report, an assertion which may lead to Damascus being referred to the U.N. Security Council.

Israeli troops shot at Palestinian protesters on its frontiers with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza on Sunday, killing nine who were marking what they term "the catastrophe" of Israel's founding in 1948.

Mideast rivals Israel and Syria announced on Tuesday ambitions to develop nuclear energy, with Israel facing the prospect that ...