Former prime minister and al-Mustaqbal Movement leader Saad Hariri’s upcoming visit to Beirut will not be swift and he will give time to his popular base and to anyone who might request to meet him -- be them ambassadors, politicians or social figures, al-Jadeed TV has reported.

Half of U.S. adults say Israel's 15-week-old military campaign in Gaza has "gone too far," a finding driven mainly by growing disapproval among Republicans and political independents, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Broadly, the poll shows support for Israel and the Biden administration's handling of the situation ebbing slightly further across the board. The poll shows 31% of U.S. adults approve of Biden's handling of the conflict, including just 46% of Democrats. That's as an earlier spike in support for Israel following the Hamas attacks Oct. 7 sags.

President Joe Biden has made it clear the U.S. will strike back after a deadly drone attack killed three service members and wounded more than 40 at a small base in Jordan over the weekend. What isn't yet clear is who will be hit, where, and how hard.

Biden has a wide array of options, but the U.S. must walk a fine line: A weak response will do little to deter further attacks by Iran-backed militia groups, while a major assault risks expanding the turmoil in the Middle East and drawing America into a wider conflict.

In the aftermath of World War II and the murder by Nazi Germany of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, the world united around a now-familiar pledge: Never again.

A key part of that lofty aspiration was the drafting of a convention that codified and committed nations to prevent and punish a new crime, sometimes called the crime of crimes: genocide.

Israel faces a growing risk of damaging its peace with neighboring Egypt as its military pushes the offensive against Hamas further south in the Gaza Strip. Already, the two sides are in a dispute over a narrow strip of land between Egypt and Gaza.

Israeli leaders say that to complete their destruction of Hamas, they must eventually widen their offensive to Gaza's southernmost town, Rafah, and take control of the Philadelphi Corridor, a tiny buffer zone on the border with Egypt that is demilitarized under the two countries' 1979 peace accord.

Sweden's bid to join NATO — held up for almost two years — cleared its next-to-last hurdle when Turkey's parliament gave its go-ahead to let the Nordic country into the alliance.

All existing NATO countries must give their approval before a new member can join the alliance, and Hungary is now the only member that hasn't given Sweden the green light.

By Sara Harmouch, American University and Nakissa Jahanbani, United States Military Academy West Point

From attacks by rebels in the Red Sea to raids in northern Israel and the Oct. 7, 2023, assault by Hamas, Western analysts have pointed a finger of blame toward Iran.

Iran's strikes this week in Pakistan, Iraq and Syria have brought back into the spotlight its ballistic missile program, which has ground forward over the past 40 years despite sanctions.

On Tuesday, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hit what it called "a spy headquarters" in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region and "terrorist" targets in Syria.

This week's airstrikes between Iran and Pakistan that killed at least 11 people mark a significant escalation in fraught relations between the neighbors.

Long-running, low-level insurgencies on either side of the border have frustrated both countries, and the apparent targets of the strikes — Iran's on Tuesday and Pakistan's response on Thursday — were insurgent groups whose goal is an independent Baluchistan for ethnic Baluch areas in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Iran's airstrike targeting an alleged outlawed separatist group in the Pakistani border province of Baluchistan has jeopardized relations between the two neighbors and potentially raised tensions in a region already roiled by Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The South Asian country recalled its ambassador to Iran on Wednesday in protest of the unprecedented attack, though both sides appeared wary of provoking the other. A military response from cash-strapped Pakistan is unlikely because the country's missile systems are primarily deployed along the eastern border to respond to potential threats from India.