Mena Today

Iranian strikes damaged multiple American military aircraft this week on the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, a U.S. official told Reuters. 

The Iran-backed Houthis are seeking to control the whole Yemeni Red Sea coast, which would further consolidate their leverage over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — one of the busiest and most contested global maritime chokepoints.

President Donald Trump said he expected the war with Iran to end after the November U.S. midterm elections and threatened again to attack a site associated with the Islamic Republic's nuclear programme after the two sides launched their biggest wave of attacks on shipping since the start of the six-month-old war.

Algeria decided to sever diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates after what it described as the "exhaustion of all means to preserve bilateral ties", Algerian state media said on Thursday, without giving details of the reason for the move.

Following Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, Pakistan has warned it may need to provide military support to Riyadh. 

Pakistan has delivered a Saudi warning to Iran to rein in its Yemeni Houthi allies after they stepped up attacks on the kingdom, in a coordinated effort to prevent the crisis from spiralling, Saudi, Pakistani and Iranian sources said.

Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis edged closer on Thursday to gaining leverage over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the world's most important routes for commodity vessels, four Yemeni government military sources said, as fighting with Saudi-backed forces tilts towards a resumption of full-scale war. 

Sheikh Rafeh Halabi, a senior figure in Israel’s Druze community who presents himself as dean of the descendants of the Prophet (Naqib al-Ashraf) for Jerusalem and president of the Jerusalem branch of an international human-rights organization, has sent a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump calling for immediate American action to halt what he describes as the starvation and extermination of Druze in Syria’s Sweida province.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Wednesday that the government does not plan to deport Palestinians from Gaza, after two Israeli ministers this month floated proposals for the mass removal of Palestinians from the coastal territory.

Israel will open its first embassy in Slovenia on Wednesday in a sign of warming relations after populist Janez Jansa formed a centre-right government following elections in March.

The presentation of credentials by a fresh wave of ambassadors to Syria's transitional president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, has drawn a notably warm response from the Syrian Liberal Party, whose statement this week reads less like routine diplomatic courtesy and more like a manifesto for what post-war Syria could become.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said Tuesday he was "deeply concerned" by an "escalation of Israeli military operations" in and around Nabatieh, southern Lebanon.