Pakistan and Afghanistan agree to temporary Eid al-Fitr'pause' in conflict Pakistan and Afghanistan have agreed to a temporary "pause" in hostilities during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr this week, officials said, amid weeks of deadly violence between the neighbouring countries. Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said on Wednesday that the pause - set to run from midnight on Thursday (19:00 GMT on Wednesday) until midnight on Tuesday (19:00 GMT on Monday) - had been requested by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkiye. However, he warned that "in case of any cross-border attack, drone attack or any terrorist incident inside Pakistan, [operations] shall immediately resume with renewed intensity". Shortly after the announcement, a spokesperson for Afghanistan's Taliban government also said it would temporarily suspend military operations against Pakistan. The pause in fighting is set to begin just days after Afghanistan accused the Pakistani military of killing hundreds of people in an air strike on a drug rehabilitation centre in the country's capital, Kabul.

The BBC has obtained footage and interviews from the Iranian capital Tehran which evoke a city of strained nerves, of constant waiting for the next air strike and relentless fear of the state security apparatus. The identities of the people in this report have been protected. While independent journalists still try to gather testimony that offers a credible alternative view, they run the risk of arrest, torture and possibly worse. Displaced Palestinians were told to secure their tents to prevent them being blown away as a storm swept through the enclave. Video filmed by a witness and verified by the BBC shows a drone crashing close to the airport.

Why have Spain, Italy sent ships to assist the Gaza flotilla? Israel's mass surveillance: Microsoft blocks the army from using its software United States tech giant Microsoft has cancelled some services it provides to the Israeli military over concerns it is violating its terms of service by using the firm's cloud computing software to spy on millions of Palestinians, the company's vice chair and president Brad Smith confirmed. Smith wrote in a Thursday blog post that the company had "ceased and disabled a set of services" to a unit within the Israeli Ministry of Defence in response to an August 6 joint investigation by The Guardian newspaper, +972 Magazine, and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call. Unit 8200 is the Israeli military's elite cyber warfare unit responsible for clandestine operations, including collecting signal intelligence and surveillance. The investigation by journalists revealed that following a 2021 meeting between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Unit 8200's leader Yossi Sariel, an agreement was reached to collaborate on moving large volumes of sensitive intelligence material into the company's Azure platform.

More than 20 people have been killed in a Russian air strike on a village in eastern Ukraine, President Volodymr Zelensky has said, citing initial reports. The victims were ordinary people collecting their pensions in the Donetsk settlement of Yarova, he said. Yarova, to the north of Sloviansk, is one of the big cities in the region and not far from the front line as Russian forces advance slowly in the east. If confirmed, the death toll would be among the heaviest attacks on Ukrainian civilians in recent weeks, 42 months into Russia's full-scale invasion. At least 23 people were killed in overnight air strikes on Ukraine's capital Kyiv at the end of August.

Ukraine intends to strike deep into Russia following a large Russian drone attack that left 60,000 Ukrainians without electricity, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said. Speaking on Sunday after a meeting with his top general, Oleksandr Syrskii, the Ukrainian president confirmed the new planned strikes on X. Both sides have intensified their air strikes in recent weeks, with Moscow attacking Ukraine's energy and transport systems as well as launching deadly strikes in recent days on civilian areas in Kyiv and Zaporizhia, and Ukraine targeting Russian oil refineries and pipelines. Overnight, Russian drones hit four energy facilities in Ukraine's Odesa region, according to the private energy company DTEK. The strikes left 29,000 people without electricity, local authorities reported.

A senior United States envoy has praised the Lebanese government's response to a US proposal aimed at disarming Hezbollah amid Israel's continued military presence in the country. Thomas Barrack, an adviser to US President Donald Trump who serves as Washington's ambassador to Turkiye and special envoy for Syria, returned to Beirut on Monday after delivering the US proposal during a June 19 visit. The plan called for the Shia Lebanese group Hezbollah to fully disarm within four months in exchange for a halt to Israeli air strikes and the full withdrawal of Israel's military from the five positions it continues to occupy in southern Lebanon. "What the government gave us was something spectacular in a very short period of time," Barrack told reporters on Monday after meeting Lebanese President Joseph Aoun. "I'm unbelievably satisfied with the response." While Barrack confirmed that he had received a seven-page reply from the Lebanese side, he offered no details on its contents.

Mogadishu, Somalia – Ending the United States' "forever wars" was a major slogan of Donald Trump's 2024 election campaign, during which he and many of his supporters spoke out against American resources and lives being put to waste in conflicts across the globe. But on February 1, a mere 10 days after being inaugurated for a second time, President Trump announced that the US had carried out air strikes targeting senior leadership of ISIL (ISIS) in Somalia. "These killers, who we found hiding in caves, threatened the United States," his post on X read. This marked Trump's first military action overseas, but it wouldn't be his last. In the time since, the US has provided weapons and support to Israel in its wars in Gaza and across the Middle East; it has launched strikes on Yemen; and even attacked Iran's nuclear facilities.

The IDF said it had killed Izadi in a strike on an apartment in Qom, south of Tehran, in the early hours of Saturday. He had been in charge of the Palestine Corps of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps's (IRGC) Quds Force, responsible for handling ties with the Palestinian armed groups. He was reportedly instrumental in arming and financing Hamas, and had been responsible for military co-ordination between senior IRGC commanders and Hamas leaders, the IDF said. In April 2024, Izadi narrowly survived an Israeli air strike targeting the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria - an attack that killed several high-ranking Quds Force commanders. Israel later on Saturday also claimed to have killed another Quds Force commander, Behnam Shahriyari in a drone strike as he was travelling in a car through western Iran.

It is beyond dispute that the potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in military intelligence are considerable. Nevertheless, it remains uncertain precisely how AI can enhance the analysis of military data. The aim of this study is to address this issue. To this end, the AI demonstrator deepCOM was developed in collaboration with the start-up Aleph Alpha. The AI functions include text search, automatic text summarization and Named Entity Recognition (NER). These are evaluated for their added value in military analysis. It is demonstrated that under time pressure, the utilization of AI functions results in assessments clearly superior to that of the control group. Nevertheless, despite the demonstrably superior analysis outcome in the experimental group, no increase in confidence in the accuracy of their own analyses was observed. Finally, the paper identifies the limitations of employing AI in military intelligence, particularly in the context of analyzing ambiguous and contradictory information.

The Houthis have claimed to have shot down a United States military drone over Yemen, in the latest attack by the group, which has disrupted shipping trade through the crucial Bab al-Mandeb Strait, drawing US strikes. The Yemeni group has carried out dozens of attacks on ships with links to Israel in a show of solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel's 11-month-old war on Gaza. Yahya Saree, the military spokesman of the Houthi group, said in a prerecorded video message released early on Sunday that the MQ-9 Reaper was shot down by air defences over Marib as "it was carrying out hostile activities". This is the eighth drone of this type to be shot down since the start of the war on Gaza, he said. The group has not so far released footage of the downed attack and surveillance aircraft that costs about 30m.