It took just days for decades-old tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas to spiral out of control, causing deaths and chaos not just in Gaza but across the Jewish state.

The deadly escalation between Israel and the Palestinians has embarrassed Gulf states which forged ties with the Jewish state and put a strain on their Abraham Accords that were billed as a game-changer.

The surge in Israeli-Palestinian violence has flummoxed the Biden administration in its first four months as it attempts to craft a Middle East policy it believes will be more durable and fairer than that of its predecessor.

Its early hesitation to wade more deeply into efforts to resolve the decades-long conflict has created a leadership vacuum that is exacerbated by political uncertainty in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, each of which is clamoring for outside support and unhappy with America's new determination to toe a middle line.

Israel's longest serving prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has until midnight Tuesday to form a new government if he is to hang onto power.

The US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, following the 9/11 terror attacks, targeted Al-Qaeda in the sanctuaries provided by the then Taliban government.

As the US formally begins withdrawing its troops from the country Saturday, bringing its longest war nearer to an end, a timeline of the last two decades:

Two hundred years after his death in exile, conspiracy theories continue to swirl about how exactly Napoleon Bonaparte met his end on the windswept South Atlantic island of St. Helena.

Children play cricket in a patch of scorched grass and scattered rubble in Abbottabad -- all that remains of the final lair of the man who was once the most wanted person on the planet.

The death of over 80 people in a Baghdad Covid-19 hospital fire was seen by Iraqis Sunday as more proof of the deadly consequences of mismanagement and corruption.

Turkey furiously rejects the mass killings of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 as genocide, although it does acknowledge many were massacred.

Since coming to power more than 20 years ago, Vladimir Putin has been fixated on one idea: restoring Russia's status as a global superpower. Whatever the cost.