Cyprus is working out with partners in the European Union and the Middle East the logistics to establish a sea corridor to deliver a stream of vital humanitarian aid to Gaza from the island's main port of Limassol once the situation on the ground permits it, authorities said Tuesday.
A senior government official — who spoke on condition of anonymity because he's not authorized to publicly discuss details of the proposal — said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "wasn't opposed" to the idea pitched by Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides last week.

The soldiers guarding Avi Chivivian's organic vegetable farm in southern Israel must first scour every corner of his fields for militants before they give him the all clear: He has six hours to work.
It's potato planting season for the farms of southern Israel, a region near the Gaza border that the Agriculture Ministry calls the country's "vegetable barn" because it supplies at least a third of Israel's vegetables. But Chivivian — one of the few remaining farmers in the area since the brutal Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas militants — no longer lives by the harvest cycle. He's on the military's timetable.

Paris police opened fire Tuesday on a woman suspected of making death threats and speaking in support of terrorism on a train into the French capital, the latest security incident in the country that has been on heightened anti-terror alert since a fatal stabbing at a school on Oct. 13 blamed on an Islamic extremist.
Police fired one shot, hitting and seriously injuring the woman, the Paris prosecutor's office said. It said she was hospitalized for emergency treatment.

The list reads 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2019, 2021, and now 2023.
Lionel Messi won the men's Ballon d'Or for a record-extending eighth time on Monday after fulfilling his life's ambition by leading Argentina to the World Cup title in Qatar last year.

Just last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted a new era of peace and prosperity in the Middle East, based on growing acceptance of Israel within the region.
Today, with the Israel-Hamas war in its fourth week, that vision is in tatters.

An Israeli government ministry has drafted a wartime proposal to transfer the Gaza Strip's 2.3 million people to Egypt's Sinai peninsula, drawing condemnation from the Palestinians and worsening tensions with Cairo.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office played down the report compiled by the Intelligence Ministry as a hypothetical exercise — a "concept paper." But its conclusions deepened long-standing Egyptian fears that Israel wants to make Gaza into Egypt's problem, and revived for Palestinians memories of their greatest trauma — the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people who fled or were forced from their homes during the fighting surrounding Israel's creation in 1948.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will make the case Tuesday that the United States should immediately send aid to Israel and Ukraine, testifying at a Senate hearing as the administration's massive $105 billion emergency aid request for conflicts in those countries and others has already hit roadblocks in the divided Congress.
President Joe Biden's Cabinet secretaries will be advocating for the foreign aid to a mostly friendly audience in the Senate, where majority Democrats and many Republicans support tying aid for the two countries together. But it faces much deeper problems in the Republican-led House, where new Speaker Mike Johnson has proposed cutting out the Ukraine aid and focusing on Israel alone, and cutting money for the Internal Revenue Service to pay for it.

Israeli ground forces attacked Hamas militants and infrastructure on Tuesday in northern Gaza, which the military said some 800,000 people have fled since the war began more than three weeks ago, even as warplanes continued to strike from end to end of the sealed-off territory.
Buoyed by the first successful rescue of a captive held by Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected calls for a cease-fire and again vowed to crush the militant group's ability to govern Gaza or threaten Israel following its bloody Oct. 7 rampage, which ignited the war.

An analysis of video evidence and witness testimonies from the scene of strikes that killed one journalist and injured six others in south Lebanon this month found that the journalists were “explicitly targeted,” the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.
Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah was killed near the village of Alma al-Shaab while covering an exchange of fire along the border between Israeli troops and members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

As the 3-week-old Israel-Hamas war enters what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says could be a "long and difficult" new stage, President Joe Biden is calling on Israeli and Arab leaders to think hard about their eventual postwar reality.
It's one, he argues, where finally finding agreement on a long-sought two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict should be a priority.
