Mena Today

The schoolyard in southern Lebanon echoed with the squeals of playing children despite the beating sun and distant booms of Israeli airstrikes. But for most of the youth there, the public school isn't where they learn. It's where they live.

Syria has begun destroying the remnants of a clandestine Assad-era chemical weapons program that it recovered in May, the first such destruction in a decade, a Syrian envoy and a U.N. representative said on Thursday. 

The Ali al-Taher ridge in southern Lebanon, which is named after a Shi'ite Muslim scholar whose shrine sits at its summit, has become one of the most contested pieces of ground in the Israel-Hezbollah war.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the release of five Lebanese nationals held by Israel, after being abducted from southern Lebanon during the successive wars since 2023.

An investigation for "insulting the president" has been opened against former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who served from 2014 to 2016 before moving into opposition, Ankara's public prosecutor announced Thursday. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday there was a chance of reaching an agreement to end the war in Ukraine, while Kyiv said it expected a "new dynamic" in peace efforts.

Britain's King Charles and his wife Queen Camilla will host Oman's Sultan Haitham bin Tariq at Windsor Castle for a state visit next month, Buckingham Palace said on Thursday.

Norway has seized a Russian ship in the Arctic to enforce a $4.22 billion compensation claim won by Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz over Moscow's seizure of its assets when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, officials said late on Wednesday.

Spain has found no evidence to conclude that July's deadly border rush from Morocco into its enclave of Ceuta was orchestrated by Moroccan authorities, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Thursday, countering allegations in a Spanish police report.

Foreign weapons, military technology, fighters and logistical networks are helping sustain Sudan's conflict and expanding the warring parties' ability to strike distant civilian areas with drones, a U.N. fact-finding mission said on Thursday.

Algeria will convert a military barracks in the Tanezrouft desert, one of the world's most inhospitable regions, into a high-security prison for drug traffickers, the Algerian presidency announced Thursday.

Iran has warned the United States that it would respond forcefully to an Israeli offensive on a mountainous ridge in southern Lebanon where Iranian military personnel are holed up alongside Hezbollah fighters, three officials briefed on the message told Reuters.