Israel

JERUSALEM (AP) — There’s a saying among us videojournalists: May the news stay far from your home. But on Saturday, Oct. 7, it came terrifyingly close to my hometown.

While I live in Jerusalem, where I work as a cameraman for The Associated Press, I was raised in Ofakim, a city a half-hour drive from the border with Gaza. My mother, parents-in-law and siblings still call it home. I met my wife there.

It was a tight-knit and safe community, made up of some 13,000 working-class Jews of North African descent. Everybody knew everybody.

20 October 2023; MEMO: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has told Israel that the British  government and leadership “want you to win” in the conflict against the Palestinian resistance, vowing London’s support for Tel Aviv along the way.

19 October 2023; MEMO: Israel has evacuated several of its embassies in the Middle East, including in Bahrain, Jordan and Morocco, according to the Israeli Broadcasting Authority’s official website on Thursday, Anadolu Agency reports.

Without giving details, the Authority reported that Israel has evacuated several of its embassies in the Middle East, including the embassies in Bahrain and Morocco.

JERUSALEM, Oct 18 (Reuters) - One Israeli cabinet minister was barred from a hospital visitors' entrance. Another's bodyguards were drenched with coffee thrown by a bereaved man. A third had "traitor" and "imbecile" shouted at her as she came to comfort families evacuated during the horror.

The shock Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas gunmen has rallied Israelis to one another. But there is little love shown for a government being widely accused of dropping the country's guard and engulfing it in a Gaza war that is rattling the region.

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — President Joe Biden vowed to show the world that the U.S. stands in solidarity with Israelis during his visit there Wednesday, and offered an assessment that the deadly explosion at a Gaza Strip hospital apparently was not carried out by the Israeli military.

“Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,” Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting. But he said there were “a lot of people out there” who weren’t sure what caused the blast, which sparked protests throughout the Middle East.

16 October 2023; MEMO: Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons are being denied medical care, resulting in sick prisoners being left without access to clinics or hospitals.

17 October 2023; MEMO: Nearly 1,000 US citizens and family members have departed Israel on State Department-sponsored charter flights and other transport options since Friday for Europe, a department spokesperson told Reuters yesterday.

The State Department said it had offered more than 4,000 seats on US government-chartered transport by air and sea to US citizens and immediate family but said the flights and other departure options have generally departed at half capacity or less.

TEL AVIV, October 16. /TASS/: Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has expressed a desire to visit Israel amid the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but the Israeli side has made it clear to Kiev that such a visit would be untimely at the moment, the Israeli news portal Ynet said.

JERUSALEM (AP) — A battle that killed dozens of civilians and more than a dozen Israeli soldiers nearly a decade ago offers a glimpse of the type of fighting that could lie ahead if Israeli forces roll into Gaza as expected to punish Hamas for its rampage across southern Israel last week.

It was July 19, 2014, during Israel’s third war against Hamas. The target was Shijaiyah, a densely populated neighborhood of Gaza City that the army said Hamas had transformed into a “terrorist fortress,” filled with tunnels, rocket launchers and booby traps.

16 October 2023; AA: The Israeli army on Monday announced the activation of a plan to "evacuate 28 Israeli villages on the Lebanese border" following an exchange of fire with Hezbollah.