Earlier on Sunday, the Israeli military said in a statement that it had also struck in southern Lebanon and killed a Hezbollah operative who “advanced Hezbollah’s attempts to re-establish itself” in the area. Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the top United Nations official in Lebanon, criticized the attack near the capital on Sunday. “Today’s strike on the southern…
Palestinian leaders in the Israeli-occupied West Bank met this week for the first gathering of its kind in years. Their mission: to allow Mahmoud Abbas, the aging Palestinian Authority president, to appoint a longtime loyalist to a newly-minted senior position. On Saturday night, Mr. Abbas formally named Hussein al-Sheikh, a close confidant, as his deputy….
During President Trump’s first term, Ukraine worried that Mr. Trump might recognize Russian control over Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Moscow forcibly seized in early 2014. As a candidate, Mr. Trump had said he would “take a look” at the matter, even though the Obama administration and America’s Western allies had rejected Russia’s annexation of the…
A deadly blast on Sunday near a UNESCO world heritage site in Yemen’s capital was caused by a Houthi missile, not a U.S. airstrike, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command said on Thursday. The health ministry of the Houthi-led government said earlier this week that an American airstrike had hit a densely populated neighborhood of…
President Trump made an unusually sharp appeal to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday, calling on him to stop his bombing campaign in Ukraine and agree to a peace deal after the deadliest attack on Kyiv in nearly a year. “Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are…
When the Trump administration proposed a peace plan that would recognize Russian rule of the Crimean peninsula, the response from Kyiv was a loud and unequivocal no. Doing so would violate the nation’s Constitution, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told reporters. It would never happen, he declared, not even in exchange for the end of…
On the first day of Russia’s all-out invasion, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and his main political opponent at home shook hands, setting aside their ferocious rivalry to focus on the enemy. The country’s typically raucous politics went largely dormant for the three years that followed. Now, as peace talks led by the Trump administration…
The Ukrainian Navy patrol boat zipped across the Black Sea, its double-barreled, 25-millimeter machine gun locked on the horizon. The enemy, Russia, was nowhere in sight, yet ever-present. In the command room, Captain Mykhailo and his crew scanned screens showing color-coded zones marking Russian mine-laden waters and red arrows tracking drones prowling the area. The…
Before President Barack Obama was sworn into office in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu called the Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas out of the blue and asked for a lesson in what was essentially a foreign tongue: the language of Democrats. “I speak Republican and you speak Democratic, and I need the intermediary,” said Mr. Netanyahu, who was…
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that Russia is running out of time to convince the Trump administration that it is serious about striking a peace deal with Ukraine and not just playing for time. Speaking in Brussels after a two-day gathering of NATO ministers, Mr. Rubio said that the United States was…