Fibre-optic drones have become Hezbollah's primary weapon against Israeli soldiers and civilians, along both sides of the Lebanese border, and are now seen as the biggest threat there, as fighting continues six weeks into a supposed ceasefire. One Israeli soldier was killed and two others injured in a drone attack near the Israeli border community of Shomera on Wednesday. Of the 11 Israeli soldiers and one civilian defence contractor killed since the ceasefire came into force, eight have been killed by fibre-optic drones. Most of the attacks have targeted Israeli forces, which are currently occupying a large area of southern Lebanon, but Hezbollah is also increasingly attacking Israeli communities across the border, according to the Alma Research Center, an Israeli think tank which monitors the conflict. It has recorded more than 100 drone attacks against communities inside Israel since the ceasefire began in April.

Israel has launched an intensive wave of strikes across swathes of southern and eastern Lebanon, after vowing to step up its military action against Hezbollah. The Israeli military said it hit more than 100 Hezbollah infrastructure sites and fighters during what was one of the heaviest nights of bombardment since a US-brokered ceasefire began in mid-April. Strikes in the Bekaa Valley village of Mashghara killed 11 people, including two children, Lebanon's health ministry said. The military said it hit sites where terrorist activity was identified. It came after Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had given the instruction to press the pedal even harder in targeting Hezbollah.

The Israeli military says it has begun a wave of strikes across Lebanon following an announcement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that his country will intensify its attacks on Hezbollah. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had launched strikes against Hezbollah sites in the Bekaa Valley in the east of Lebanon and additional areas across the country. It followed a video statement on Monday evening in which Netanyahu said Israel was at war with Hezbollah and that he had given the military instructions to deal them a crushing blow. Earlier this month Lebanon and Israel agreed to extend a 45-day ceasefire, though some fighting has continued. There will be fears in Beirut that these latest Israeli attacks will widen to include Lebanon's capital city.

At least nine people, including two children, were killed in Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon on Thursday, the health ministry said, as violence continues despite a ceasefire now in its second week. The strikes - which Israel said were targeting Hezbollah infrastructure - also wounded 23 people, among them eight children and seven women, the ministry said. Separately, Hezbollah said it had carried out attacks on Israeli forces in the south, including a drone strike targeting soldiers in the Bint Jbeil district. The violence comes as Israel presses ahead with military operations in Lebanon despite the ceasefire announced on 16 April, after direct talks between Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors in Washington. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun criticised what he described as continuing Israeli violations of the truce, saying strikes and demolitions of homes and places of worship were ongoing despite the ceasefire.

Can Pakistan join the Gaza stabilisation force? Two Palestinian children have been killed in an Israeli drone attack on the town of Bani Suheila, east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, according to medics. Witnesses told Al Jazeera that drones dropped a bomb on a group of civilians near al-Farabi School on Saturday morning, killing two brothers, Juma and Fadi Tamer Abu Assi. The area targeted by the attack lies beyond the so-called Yellow Line marking the Israeli forces' redeployment boundary agreed under the ceasefire agreement, which took effect on October 10, sources said. Earlier on Saturday, the Israeli military launched ground, naval, and air attacks on several parts of Gaza.

Next week, five teens from Palestine will head to Panama to compete in one of the world's largest youth robotics competitions. To win--and then teach STEM to their peers displaced by the Israel-Hamas war. For the entirety of the past year, as the teenage roboticists of Team Palestine have been working on their latest project, their homeland has been engulfed in Israel's war with Hamas . Earlier this month, that all changed. With a fragile ceasefire in place, Israeli forces began to pull back from parts of Gaza, and the teens put the final touches on the project they hope will bring them victory: a robot that can maneuver through a series of simulated challenges based on the effects of climate change.

Political language is deeply intertwined with social identities. While social identities are often shaped by specific cultural contexts and expressed through particular uses of language, existing datasets for group and identity detection are predominantly English-centric, single-label and focus on coarse identity categories. We introduce HebID, the first multilabel Hebrew corpus for social identity detection: 5,536 sentences from Israeli politicians' Facebook posts (Dec 2018-Apr 2021), manually annotated for twelve nuanced social identities (e.g. Rightist, Ultra-Orthodox, Socially-oriented) grounded by survey data. We benchmark multilabel and single-label encoders alongside 2B-9B-parameter generative LLMs, finding that Hebrew-tuned LLMs provide the best results (macro-$F_1$ = 0.74). We apply our classifier to politicians' Facebook posts and parliamentary speeches, evaluating differences in popularity, temporal trends, clustering patterns, and gender-related variations in identity expression. We utilize identity choices from a national public survey, enabling a comparison between identities portrayed in elite discourse and the public's identity priorities. HebID provides a comprehensive foundation for studying social identities in Hebrew and can serve as a model for similar research in other non-English political contexts.

Can Israel survive economic isolation? Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has said his country's navy will join Italy in sending warships to protect the Global Sumud Flotilla, which has come under drone attack in international waters en route to deliver aid to Gaza. Speaking to reporters in New York on Wednesday, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Sanchez said international law must be respected and the citizens of 45 nations participating in the aid mission had every right to sail in the Mediterranean unharmed. "Tomorrow we will dispatch a naval vessel from Cartagena with all necessary resources in case it is necessary to assist the flotilla and carry out a rescue operation." On Wednesday night, activists described a wave of attacks by Israeli drones and other aircraft which targeted vessels in the small fleet in what flotilla organisers described as "an alarmingly dangerous escalation".

Italy condemns'drone attack' on Gaza aid flotilla and deploys frigate Italy's defence minister has condemned what he said was an overnight drone attack by unidentified perpetrators on a flotilla trying to breach Israel's naval blockade of Gaza to deliver aid. Guido Crosetto also said he had ordered an Italian Navy frigate to head towards the 52 boats in the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), which are mostly off the coast of Crete, to assist Italian citizens on board. The GSF said several boats reported explosions and unidentified objects being dropped, as well as drones overhead and communications jamming. It accused Israel of a dangerous escalation. Israel's government has not commented.

A United Nations commission of inquiry says Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. A new report says there are reasonable grounds to conclude that four of the five genocidal acts defined under international law have been carried out since the start of the war with Hamas in 2023: killing members of a group, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to destroy the group, and preventing births. It cites statements by Israeli leaders, and the pattern of conduct by Israeli forces, as evidence of genocidal intent. Israel's foreign ministry said it categorically rejected the report, denouncing it as distorted and false. A spokesperson accused the three experts on the commission of serving as Hamas proxies and relying entirely on Hamas falsehoods, laundered and repeated by others that had already been thoroughly debunked.