Iran confirmed the arrest of Italian journalist Cecilia Sala for “violating the laws of the Islamic Republic”, Iran’s official IRNA news agency reported yesterday.

A Syria war monitor said 31 combatants had been killed since Sunday in ongoing battles between Turkey-backed groups and Kurdish-led forces.

Israeli forces carrying out a weeks-long offensive in northern Gaza ordered any residents remaining in Beit Hanoun to quit the town yesterday, pointing to Hamas rocket fire from the area, residents said.

Syria’s new authorities have arrested nearly 300 people, including informants, pro-regime fighters and former soldiers, in a crackdown on loyalists to ousted former president Bashar al-Assad, a monitor said yesterday.

Gaza health officials and the WHO yesterday said that an Israeli military raid has shut down the last major health facility in northern Gaza.

The Israeli military said it intercepted a missile launched from Yemen early yesterday, a day after the Huthi-held capital Sanaa was hit by fresh air strikes.

Iraqi authorities are working to exhume the remains of around 100 Kurdish women and children thought to have been killed in the 1980s under former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, three officials said.

The Israeli military reported it conducted air strikes yesterday targeting “infrastructure” on the Syrian-Lebanese border near the village of Janta, which it said was used to smuggle weapons to the armed group Hezbollah.

Israeli forces raided the Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of only three medical facilities on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip, yesterday, ordering dozens of patients and hundreds of others to evacuate the compound, officials said.

Gaza authorities said an Israeli airstrike killed five Palestinian journalists outside a hospital yesterday, though Israel’s army said it had attacked a vehicle carrying Islamic Jihad fighters.

The United Nations’ peacekeeping force in Lebanon yesterday expressed concern at the “continuing” damage done by Israeli forces in the country’s south despite a ceasefire in the war with Hezbollah.

Turkish military killed 21 Kurdish militants in northern Syria and Iraq, the defence ministry said yesterday.

Hamas yesterday accused Israel of imposing “new conditions” that it said were delaying a ceasefire agreement in the war in Gaza, though it acknowledged negotiations were still ongoing.

Lebanon’s state media said an Israeli air strike targeted the Baalbek region in the east of the country before dawn yesterday, branding it a “violation” of the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.

The Israeli army has intensified its attacks on the health facilities in northern Gaza, as it besieged and “directly targeted” the Indonesian Hospital, Kamal Adwan Hospital and al-Awda Hospital in the past hours, the enclave’s health ministry said yesterday.

Gaps between Israel and Hamas over a possible Gaza ceasefire have narrowed, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials’ remarks yesterday, though crucial differences have yet to be resolved.

At least nine people were killed yesterday when a bus collided with a fuel truck in Iran’s southeast, state media reported, the second mass casualty road accident within days.

Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip killed at least 28 Palestinians, eight of them at a school sheltering displaced families in Gaza City, medics said, as the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the north.

A missile fired from Yemen by Iran-backed Huthi rebels struck Israel’s commercial hub Tel Aviv before dawn yesterday, wounding 16 people in the second such attack in days.

Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian residents said yesterday, and video showed “Revenge”, “Death to Arabs” and other slogans had been spray-painted in Hebrew on the building’s facade.