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On Friday, the Israeli military said two explosive-laden drones had targeted its forces in the Golan early the previous morning. Two officers from the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion were killed, it said, and 24 other soldiers were wounded.

Yet, the leaders of the three factions that are continuing to target Israel, as well as Iraqi officials, challenged the Israeli account and said they did not strike the Golan that day.

“Since October of last year, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has carried out more than 160 operations targeting the Israeli interior and the occupied areas in the Golan Heights."

“The resistance announces the operations it carries out as soon as they happen. The resistance did not announce this operation or claim responsibility for it as was reported,” he added. If we had carried it out, we would have announced it.”

‘An embarrassing moment’ at CNN

In November, CNN International Diplomatic Editor Nic Robertson embedded with the Israeli army to visit Gaza’s bombed-out al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital.

Once inside, military spokesperson Daniel Hagari claimed to have found proof Hamas was using the hospital to hide Israeli captives. Hagari showed Robertson a document on the wall written in Arabic, which he said was a roster of Hamas members watching over the captives. “This is a guarding list. Every terrorist has his own shift,” Hagari told Robertson.

To make matters worse, the Israeli claim had already been debunked by Arabic speakers on social media before the CNN footage aired, and, according to multiple CNN journalists and an internal WhatsApp chat seen by Al Jazeera, a Palestinian producer alerted her colleagues, including Robertson, but was ignored. After the report aired on television, they said, another producer tried to get it corrected before it was posted online.

‘No balance’ at the BBC

In the days after October 7, the BBC set up an internal group chat in which producers could screen potential interviewees based on their online footprint. Al Jazeera has obtained messages from that chat.

“It was overwhelmingly guests on the Palestinian side of things who were being looked into,” she said. “Palestinians [were] being flagged up for using the word Zionist, which isn’t something to flag necessarily.”

Former US President Donald Trump has suggested that Israel attack Iran's nuclear facilities. The Republican presidential candidate was speaking at a campaign rally in the southern state of North Carolina on Friday.

One participant asked Trump about countermeasures against Iran's recent missile attack on Israel. Trump criticized President Joe Biden for voicing opposition to Israel targeting Iran's nuclear sites.

The former president said Biden "got that one wrong." He added that Biden's answer should have been, "Hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later."

For the first time in more than 20 years, Israeli fighter jets bombed a West Bank city on Thursday night.

Eighteen people were killed and many others wounded, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Fayed, who lost his brother in the attack, was in a nearby building when the Israeli missile hit his cafe.

It was a normal night, he told Middle East Eye, with people gathered to eat and smoke as usual. Within seconds, the bombing changed the scene completely, he added. “There were bodies strewn on the fences, the utility poles, the roads and under the rubble,” he recalled.

US officials believe they can exploit the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah's disarray to push for the election of a president in Lebanon, according to Axios.

The report echoes the belief among some Lebanese opposition leaders who spoke to Middle East Eye that there is an opportunity to push for the election of a president after the post has been vacant since October 2022.

Under Lebanon's de facto confessional system, the president of Lebanon must be a Christian.

The Pentagon will spend about $1.2 billion to maintain ships deployed as part of operations in the Red Sea and to replenish stocks of missiles fired to repel attacks by Iran and its proxies, according to new budget documents.

About $190 million will be spent on the restock of the sea-launched RTX Corp. Standard Missile-3 Block 1B and about $8.5 million will go for more heat-seeking air-to-air AIM-X Sidewinder missiles, according to the documents.

Each advance model Standard Missile-3 Block IB costs between $9 million and $10 million. Two Navy destroyers this week fired about 12 Standard Missiles in defending Israel from another wave of Iranian assaults on Tuesday, according to a Navy official who declined to disclose the exact models and asked not to be identified discussing non-public information. That means this week’s US assistance likely cost about $120 million.

The documents also reveal requests for $276 million to buy additional Standard Missile, SM-6 model weapons as well as by $57.3 million for Tomahawks cruise missiles. Another $6.7 million is earmarked Enhanced Sea Sparrow self-defense missile. All those weapons are made by RTX.

The Pentagon will also spend $25 million for Boeing Co. Jdam-GPS guidance kits and $7.4 million for its Small Diameter Bomb. Another $25 million will go to “increase manufacturing sources” for the Standard Missile to support the Pentagon response to what it calls “the situation in Israel.”

Airstrikes were launched on Friday at several parts of Yemen including its capital Sanaa and Hodeidah airport, Al Masirah TV, the main television news outlet run by the Houthi movement controlling much of Yemen, and residents said.

Strikes also targeted the south of Dhamar city, Al Masirah TV added.

Al Masirah TV reported that the strikes had been carried out by US and British forces, but a British government source said Britain was not involved.

Romal Ahmadi’s voice trembles when he recalls the day of the drone strike. “All my three children ran out of the house to welcome my older brother as he returned from work. I was sitting in the living room. They ran in the courtyard and the next thing I heard was a loud explosion.”

His children were Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Aayat, 2. All of them were killed on August 29, 2021 when an American hellfire missile struck the car in their courtyard. In total, seven children and three adults were killed.

The target of the U.S. strike was the oldest Ahmadi brother, Zemarai. The U.S. military tracked him for several hours that day via a drone after they observed him filling some containers. Ahmadi was employed with an American aid organization, distributing food in Afghanistan.

Every now and then he brought containers to his office to fill them up with potable water and bring them home. Then he made his way from his office back home, which was in the same direction as the Kabul Airport. When he reached his home, the drone operator fired the missile.

As Israel pounded northern Gaza with air strikes last October and ordered the evacuation of more than a million Palestinians from the area, a senior Pentagon official delivered a blunt warning to the White House.

The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel, Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, wrote in an Oct. 13 email to senior aides to President Joe Biden. Stroul was relaying an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone,” she wrote.

The emails reviewed by Reuters show a scramble inside the Biden administration to warn the White House of the impending crisis – and the White House’s initial resistance to a ceasefire in the early, chaotic days of war. The three sets of email exchanges began on Oct. 11, during Israel’s fifth day of air strikes after the Hamas incursion.

After Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza’s hospitals, schools and mosques, the U.S. State Department’s top public diplomacy official, Bill Russo, told senior State officials that Washington was “losing credibility among Arab-speaking audiences” by not directly addressing the humanitarian crisis, according to an Oct. 11 email.

Gaza’s health authorities reported that day a death toll of about 1,200. As Israel defended the strikes, saying Hamas was using civilian buildings for military purposes, Russo wrote that U.S. diplomats in the Middle East were monitoring Arab media reports that accused Israel of waging a “genocide” and Washington of complicity in war crimes.

“The U.S.’s lack of response on the humanitarian conditions for Palestinians is not only ineffective and counterproductive, but we are also being accused of being complicit to potential war crimes by remaining silent on Israel’s actions against civilians,” Russo wrote

Biden’s public comments on Gaza had largely given Netanyahu a free hand against Hamas. At the time, Biden faced only scattered protests from the left wing of the Democratic Party over his support for Israel's counterattack. Israel's likening of the Hamas assault to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington resonated widely in the U.S.

The new customs rule applies to truck convoys chartered by the United Nations to take aid from Jordan to Gaza via Israel, seven people familiar with the matter said. Under the rule, individuals from relief organizations sending aid must complete a form providing passport details, and accept liability for any false information on a shipment, the people said.

They said relief agencies are disputing that requirement, which was announced mid-August, because they fear signing the form could expose staff to legal problems if aid fell into the hands of Hamas or other enemies of Israel.

In a parallel move, Israeli authorities have restricted commercial food shipments to Gaza amid concerns that Hamas was benefiting from that trade, the people familiar with the matter and industry sources said.

U.N. and Israeli government data show that in September, deliveries of food and aid sank to their lowest in seven months. Israeli's military humanitarian unit, Cogat, which oversees aid and commercial shipments to Gaza, confirmed that no U.N.-chartered convoy has moved from Jordan to Gaza since Sept. 19, but a spokesperson said Israel was not blocking goods.