The US Senate easily passed a $716.3 billion defense authorization bill Wednesday that includes funding for Israel to defend itself against Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as ramping up military spending and bolstering America’s posture against Russia while avoiding policy changes that would have antagonized US President Donald Trump.
Senior officials in US President Donald Trump’s administration assured Israel that its tough stance against Iran has not changed, after Trump’s offer to engage in talks was strongly rebuffed by Iranian officials.
Russia and Israel have reached an agreement to remove Iranian forces in Syria to within 85 kilometers of the Golan Heights border, Russia’s special envoy for Syria told the Sputnik news agency on Wednesday.
U.S. lawmakers have introduced a new piece of legislation that would drastically reduce U.S. funding for the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA.
The Syrian government regained control of the frontier with the Israel’s Golan Heights for the first time in seven years on Monday, after Islamic State-linked militants gave up their last pocket of territory in the area.
Police forces entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque during clashes with Muslim worshipers Friday afternoon that led to an hours-long closure of the Jerusalem holy site.
Saudi Arabia has reassured Arab allies it will not endorse any Middle East peace plan that fails to address Jerusalem’s status or refugees’ right of return, easing their concerns that the kingdom might back a nascent US deal which aligns with Israel on key issues.
The stone that fell from the Western Wall earlier this week proves that Israel has devised a plan to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a spokesperson for the ruling Fatah faction headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claimed on Thursday.
Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, announced Thursday morning that its forces were going on high alert, deploying at the highest readiness level in expectation of a possible full-blown war with Israel.
A long-awaited Middle East peace plan from the Trump administration will include what the White House is calling a robust economic plan to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an official has said.
The Israeli Air Force shot down a Syrian fighter jet that traveled two kilometers into Israeli airspace on Tuesday afternoon, the military said. Syrian state-run media confirmed the jet was shot down but said it was inside its own airspace.
Israel’s David’s Sling air defense system made its operational debut Monday, when an interceptor missile was launched as a precaution against ballistic missiles fired within neighboring Syria, the military said.
The Israel Air Force launched a major wave of strikes at Hamas targets across the Gaza Strip on Friday evening as a cabinet minister said Israel was preparing a massive response to Hamas’s failure to heed repeated Israeli warnings to end the violence along the Gaza border.
Israeli jets reportedly carried out a strike Sunday on a missile production facility in northwest Syria that observers say was supervised by Iranians. In the past, the site was allegedly used to produce and store chemical weapons.
Senior Advisor to US President Donald Trump Jared Kushner, Top Negotiator Jason Greenblatt and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman called on Hamas to stop terror, return Israeli prisoners to their families and, in exchange, receive aid to improve the situation in the Gaza Strip in a column published by the Washington Post Thursday night.
‘We enshrined in law the basic principle of our existence,’ said Netanyahu. ‘Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people, which respects the individual rights of all its citizens. This is our state — the Jewish state. In recent years there have been some who have attempted to put this in doubt, to undercut the core of our being. Today we made it law: This is our nation, language and flag.’
Israel and Russia have been in talks regarding the imminent return of Syrian regime forces to the border region on the Golan Heights, reportedly with a view to reestablishing demarcation lines drawn up in 1974.
Israel’s political leadership has reportedly instructed the army to prepare for a military offensive in the Gaza Strip, to be initiated if the launching of incendiary devices from the Hamas-run coastal enclave into Israeli territory continues.
US President Donald Trump on Monday said his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday was good for Israel, seemingly referring to efforts to remove Iran-backed fighters from Syria’s Golan border.
The IDF deployed Iron Dome missile defense batteries across central Israel and reinforced the batteries in the south of the country, the military announced Sunday evening.