Category: 2. Middle East

The US and Iran “made very good progress” in direct and indirect discussions, a US official said Saturday, Anadolu reports.

“We agreed to meet again next week and are grateful to our Omani partners for facilitating these talks and to our Italian partners for hosting us today,” the official said in a statement.

The official said the second round of talks in Rome lasted more than four hours.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described the talks as…

The Israeli army acknowledged late Saturday that an officer was killed and three soldiers, including a female officer, were seriously wounded during a battle in the northern Gaza Strip, Anadolu reports.

The announcement came as the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, announced that its fighters conducted a “complex ambush” of Israeli soldiers and destroyed a tank and bulldozer in Gaza City.

“Warrant Officer G’haleb Sliman Alnasasra, 35 years…

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and the head of Hamas’ Shura Council on Saturday discussed efforts to establish a ceasefire in Gaza, Anadolu Agency reports.

According to Turkish diplomatic sources, Fidan and Muhammad Darwish along with his delegation met in the Turkish capital Ankara.

During the meeting, it was underlined that Israel, by blocking the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, is trying to starve the Palestinian population, stressing the need for…

At first glance, there is nothing unusual about the bulky bulldozer turning up soil at a testing site in central Israel, but as it pulled closer it became clear: the driver’s cabin is eerily empty.

This is the Robdozer, a fortified engineering vehicle manned remotely, and in this case operated from a military expo halfway across the globe in Alabama.

Army engineers and military experts say that the Robdozer — the robotic version of Caterpillar’s D9 bulldozer — is the future of automated…

The Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian resistance group Hamas, released a brief video on Saturday featuring an audio message from an Israeli captive, titled “Soon … Time is Running Out”, Anadolu Agency reports.

The 21-second clip contains a voice message from an unnamed captive, directed to his mother.

No image, name, or identifying details of the captive were shown in the video. It ends with the image of an hourglass and the phrase “Time…

Israeli authorities have denied Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa permission to visit Palestinian towns and villages in the occupied West Bank that have been repeatedly targeted by illegal settlers, a Palestinian official said Saturday, Anadolu Agency reports.

Mouayed Shaban, head of the Colonization and Wall and Resistance Commission, told Anadolu that Israel refused to coordinate Mustafa’s planned visit to the villages of Burqa and Deir Dibwan, east…

Palestine on Saturday warned of growing incitement by Israeli far-right settler groups calling for the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, Anadolu reports.

Palestine’s Foreign Ministry condemned an AI-generated video titled “Next Year in Jerusalem,” circulating on extremist Hebrew platforms. The video shows Al-Aqsa Mosque being bombed and replaced by a so-called Third Temple.

In a statement, the ministry called the video “a…

Qatar’s chief negotiator voiced frustration over talks for a truce in Gaza in an interview with AFP, a month after Israel resumed its strikes on the Palestinian territory and another round of negotiations ended without a deal.

“We’re definitely frustrated by the slowness, sometimes, of the process in the negotiation. This is an urgent matter. There are lives at stake here if this military operation continues day by day,” Mohammed Al-Khulaifi said on Friday.

Qatar, with the United States and…

The fate of a US-Israeli hostage who Hamas said had featured in an Israeli truce proposal remains unknown, the group said on Saturday, separately releasing a video of another captive alive.

The body of a guard assigned to the American-Israeli, Edan Alexander, had been recovered from the site of a recent Israeli strike, Hamas’s armed wing the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades said in a statement.

“But the fate of the prisoner and the rest of the captors remains unknown,” the militants said.

Hamas on…

The number of Israelis who signed petitions demanding the return of captives from Gaza even at the cost of halting the war climbed to nearly 140,000 as of Saturday, according to the campaign, which is gaining momentum across Israeli society.

The movement, coordinated through the website Restored Israel, reflects growing frustration over the government’s military strategy and its failure to secure the release of captives.

In the past 24 hours alone, over 10,000…