For decades, Hezbollah’s grip on Lebanon was iron tight. With its vast arsenal, the militant group was more powerful than the country’s national military. It controlled or held sway over Lebanon’s most important government agencies as well as critical infrastructure, like its border with Syria and commercial port. Almost no major political decisions could be […]

The House on Thursday passed legislation that would impose sanctions on officials at the International Criminal Court, making a frontal assault on the tribunal in a rebuke of its move to charge top Israeli leaders with war crimes for their offensive against Hamas in Gaza. The bill instructs the president to freeze property assets and […]

Lebanon’s fractured Parliament overcame more than two years of gridlock on Thursday to choose a new president, a critical step toward bringing stability to a country attempting to recover from economic catastrophe and a devastating war. Lawmakers elected Gen. Joseph Aoun, the commander of the Lebanese military, by an overwhelming majority in the second round […]

Iran’s top ranking general in Syria has contradicted the official line taken by Iran’s leaders on the sudden downfall of their ally Bashar al-Assad, saying in a remarkably candid speech last week that Iran had suffered a major defeat but would still try to operate in the country. An audio recording of the speech, given […]

In easier times for Egypt’s refugees, Azza Mostafa, a pro-government TV anchor, had nothing but generous words for the many thousands of Syrians who had built new lives in Egypt after their own country imploded into civil war in 2011. “I’d like to say to our Syrian families and our brothers in Egypt,” she said […]

An Israeli reservist left Brazil in a hurry this week after a Brazilian judge ordered an investigation into whether he committed war crimes in Gaza. Israeli consular officials helped the soldier, Yuval Vagdani, fly out of the country on Sunday after the order became public. It was prompted by a criminal complaint filed by a […]

An Israeli drone strike killed three cousins, including two children, in the West Bank on Wednesday, according to the local Palestinian governor and a relative, as growing violence threatens to further destabilize the Israeli-occupied territory. The attack struck the courtyard of the cousins’ home in the town of Tamoun, said Ahmed Asad, the Palestinian governor […]

For more than a year, millions of Palestinians living in Gaza have been homeless, facing severe food and medical shortages and under enduring threat of Israeli airstrikes. Nearly 46,000 Gazans have been killed, local health officials said on Wednesday, in a landscape largely reduced to rubble. So when President-elect Donald J. Trump vowed that “all […]

Ireland has formally joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, according to a statement on Tuesday from the International Court of Justice. The filing, made on Monday, comes months after Ireland announced plans to intervene in the case before the United Nations’ highest judicial body. “Ireland, invoking Article 63 of the Statute of the Court, […]

Syria’s main airport handled its first international flights on Tuesday since the fall of the government of former President Bashar al-Assad last month, as the new leaders press to reassert a semblance of normalcy in the war-weary country. One Qatar Airways plane landed following a direct flight from Doha to the Syrian capital, Damascus. Jordan’s […]