Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz has quit the emergency government in a sign of deepening divisions over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's post-conflict plans for Gaza.

Speaking during a news conference in Tel Aviv on Sunday where he announced his resignation, Mr Gantz said the decision was made with a "heavy heart". 

"Unfortunately, Mr Netanyahu is preventing us from approaching true victory, which is the justification for the painful ongoing crisis," he said.

Qatari news network Al Jazeera is stridently denying any link to Gaza-based journalist Abdallah Aljamal, amid unverified rumors that hostage Noa Argamani had been held at his home in central Gaza’s Nuseirat.

According to various rumors, some of which have been picked up by Hebrew-language media with varying levels of credulity, Argamani was held at the home of Dr. Ahmed Aljamal and his son Abdallah. They also claim that Abdallah is an employee of Al-Jazeera.

Hours after being rescued from eight months captivity in Gaza, freed hostage Noa Argamani arrived at a hospital in Tel Aviv to see her terminally ill mother.

Argamani, 26, was one of the most recognized faces among the hostages abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7. Harrowing footage of her being taken into Gaza on the back of a motorcycle, pleading for her life and reaching desperately towards her boyfriend being marched alongside her on foot circulated across the globe.

Hamas cannot agree to any deal unless Israel makes a "clear" commitment to a permanent ceasefire and a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, a senior official from the Palestinian militant group said on Tuesday.

Qatar, which alongside the United States and Egypt has been mediating talks between Hamas and Israel, has also urged Israel to provide a clear position that has the backing of its entire government to reach a deal.

A foreign citizen was detained in Romania's capital Bucharest on Monday after throwing a Molotov cocktail outside the Israeli embassy, causing no damage or casualties, police said.

The Romanian Intelligence Service said its anti-terrorism officers caught the 34-year-old suspect, who allegedly also threatened he will set himself on fire, and handed him over to police.

Hadi Matar, the man accused of nearly fatally stabbing British-American writer Salman Rushdie, is negotiating a plea agreement with both US state and federal prosecutors that could shed light on whether a foreign government or terrorist organization was involved in the attack, officials involved in the case told Semafor.

Matar is scheduled to go on trial for attempted murder this September in a western New York courthouse not far from the Chautauqua Institution where Rushdie was assaulted while giving a speech in August 2022 at a summer cultural festival. But federal prosecutors from the US Attorney’s Office are separately investigating whether Matar, 26, was part of a broader conspiracy to assassinate the writer, according to lawyers and US officials involved in the case. The revolutionary founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, in 1989, calling for Rushdie’s death on the grounds that his novel, The Satanic Verses, was blasphemous against Islam.

In 1989, blowback was swift; alienation today is ‘systematic, progressive, long-term.’

China’s 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists sparked a seminal crisis in Beijing’s relationship with the West. On the massacre’s 35th anniversary, China’s leaders face familiar international blowback over their conduct.

Instead of gunfire, today’s sources of discomfort about China are a mix of its aggressive industrial policy and militarization toward neighbors, plus a national-security agenda from Chinese leader Xi Jinping that has curtailed personal freedoms at home and shaped affairs abroad.

BANGKOK, Thailand —  In 2019, business was booming for Owen Zhu. He was one year into his new career in real estate, showing Bangkok properties to Chinese investors.

Then the pandemic halted travel and spending. Even now, Chinese buyers are slow to return.

The exception has been one group that has since become Zhu’s specialty: LGBTQ+ clients looking to build a new life for themselves outside China.

Israeli War Cabinet member Benny Gantz announced Wednesday his centrist National Unity party has introduced a bill to dissolve the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, which would trigger an early election.

It is unclear when lawmakers might vote on the bill, which requires a majority vote to pass. Israeli law stipulates there cannot be another vote for six months if the motion fails.

JOHANNESBURG — South Africa’s ruling African National Congress looks set to lose its parliamentary majority for the first time since coming to power after the end of apartheid 30 years ago, according to projections based on early election results.

Polls in Wednesday’s election closed at 2100. On Thursday, with results received from 13.9% of polling stations, electoral commission data showed the ANC had secured 42.6% of the vote. The main opposition Democratic Alliance had 25.8% and the leftwing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) stood at 8.5%.

Rising sea levels due to climate change have forced an Indigenous Guna community to leave their homes on an island off Panama's coast that is fast disappearing.

Some 300 families - 1,351 people - based in Gardi Subdug, a small Caribbean island a couple of kilometers off the Central American coastline, received keys on Wednesday to their new houses in a small woodland settlement on the mainland.

Security services say spate of fires and infrastructure attacks could be part of systemic attempt by Russia to destabilise continent

Security services around Europe are on alert to a potential new weapon of Russia’s war – arson and sabotage – after a spate of mystery fires and attacks on infrastructure in the Baltics, Germany and the UK.

When a fire broke out in Ikea in Vilnius in Lithuania this month, few passed any remarks until the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, suggested it could have been the work of a foreign saboteur.