The Israeli prime minister’s office posted on the social platform X that the pair spoke on Thursday and that Netanyahu “raised the severity of the statements made by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his people against the existence of the State of Israel.”

After this week’s NATO summit in Turkey, Trump indicated he may be ready to have the U.S. sell F-35 fighter jets to Erdogan’s country -- but he also said he’s not yet fully made up his mind.

France has finally returned 23 Syrian archaeological treasures that remained in the country for about 15 years after being loaned for an exhibition. Their return coincided with French President Emmanuel Macron's landmark visit to Damascus — the first by a major Western leader since the ouster of Bashar Assad in late 2024.

The artifacts, flown aboard Macron's presidential aircraft on Tuesday and returned to Syria's National Museum, include Roman bronze objects, Byzantine and Islamic-era pieces and a richly colored mosaic panel that once adorned the Umayyad Mosque. The collection was loaned in 2011 to an exhibition of Syrian antiquities at the Arab World Institute in Paris.

Germany has struck a deal with the United States to buy American-made Tomahawk cruise missiles and station them in Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced Thursday.

The German leader said the agreement on the long-range missiles, which are used to strike targets deep inside enemy territory, was reached this week on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Turkey's capital, Ankara.

A deal between Lebanon and Israel was billed as paving the way for peace. But in Lebanon, it is deepening longtime divisions and raising fears of political paralysis or even a return to civil war.

The U.S.-brokered deal envisions an Israeli troop withdrawal from Lebanon and an eventual peace agreement between the two countries — which technically remain in a state of war nearly 80 years after Israel's establishment. But the agreement says a full Israeli withdrawal will happen only after Hezbollah is disarmed, infuriating the Iran-backed militant group.

Russia's track and field federation says it has gone to the Court of Arbitration for Sport to overturn a World Athletics ruling suspending its athletes from international events due to the war in Ukraine.

World Athletics excluded all athletes from Russia and its ally Belarus from its international events in March 2022, days after Russian forces invaded Ukraine.

He is the grandson of an influential Shiite cleric, born in Qom — the heart of religious studies in Iran — and raised in a traditional family that embraced the theocracy. But by his late 20s, he had stopped praying and given up on clerical rule. Now, he can barely discuss politics or religion with his siblings and father.

The tech worker, now in his mid-30s, says Iranian society is deeply divided, even among opponents of the Islamic Republic, and he blames one man — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The supreme leader who ruled Iran for over three decades will be laid to rest Thursday after being killed at the start of the war.

Ukrainian drones hit more Russian oil facilities and set two oil tankers ablaze in the Sea of Azov on Thursday, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to grant Kyiv a license to manufacture the Patriot air defense systems to protect its cities.

A top Ukrainian official, meanwhile, cautioned that it could take a year or more for the country to produce Patriot interceptor missiles.

The global chemical weapons watchdog on Thursday reinstated Syria's voting rights at the body, rewarding Damascus for "constructive engagement" with the organization and a willingness to destroy previously hidden stockpiles of toxic munitions.

The decision by the executive council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons underscores a new era of cooperation since the ouster of former President Bashar Assad in 2024, and comes five years after Syria's voting rights were suspended as a punishment for the repeated use of toxic gas by Damascus. It was the first time a member state had been hit with such a sanction.

The United States launched new airstrikes against Iran early Thursday, and Tehran responded by targeting Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar in crossfire that again threatened an interim deal intended to help end the war in the Persian Gulf.

The strikes came hours after U.S. President Donald Trump said recent Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz signaled the end of the fragile ceasefire. The U.S. struck a variety of military sites and port facilities early Wednesday after Iran targeted several merchant vessels off the coast of Oman, sparking Iranian fire then as well.

An Israeli strike on Gaza just before the kickoff of the Egypt-Argentina World Cup match killed a top Palestinian aid official who was instrumental in efforts to organize public screenings of the game across the enclave, according to local health officials.

The blast turned what was supposed to be a moment of celebration — the live screening of a potential Argentina upset by an Arab team — into a reminder of how the near-daily Israeli strikes across Gaza are continuing to kill civilians despite a truce reached in October.