Israel's voters, who include settlers in the occupied West Bank, Tel Aviv residents eyeing change and Arabs in annexed east Jerusalem, are days away from their fourth election in less than two years.

Shops closing, companies going bankrupt and pharmacies with shelves emptying — in Lebanon these days, fistfights erupt in supermarkets as shoppers scramble to get to subsidized powdered milk, rice and cooking oil.

Like almost every other Lebanese, Nisrine Taha's life has been turned upside down in the past year under the weight of the country's crushing economic crisis. Anxiety for the future is eating at her.

Daraa was an impoverished, neglected provincial city in the farmlands of Syria's south, an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim backwater far from the more cosmopolitan cities of the country's heartland.

But in March 2011 it became the first to explode against the rule of President Bashar Assad. Assad's decision to crush the initially peaceful protests propelled Syria into a civil war that has killed more than a half million people, driven half the population from their homes and sucked in foreign military interventions that have carved up the country.

Chinese factories torched as mainland workers hunker down under martial law -- Beijing is being pulled into the ulcerous crisis in Myanmar, an unravelling country it had carefully stitched into its big plans for Asia.

Lebanon's worst economic downturn in decades has pushed a battered population to the brink with no solution in sight as the country's barons wrangle over forming a new government.

Lebanon is battling its worst economic crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war. The national currency is in freefall, while poverty and unemployment are on the rise.

Benjamin Netanyahu has remained in power as Israeli prime minister for a record 12 consecutive years, partly by convincing some voters that only he can keep the Jewish state safe while defending it on the world stage. 

But on March 23, the 71-year-old wily politician faces his fourth re-election contest in less than two years, after repeatedly failing to unite a coalition behind him, despite his devoted right-wing base. 

Mohammed Zakaria has lived in a plastic tent in eastern Lebanon's Bekaa Valley for almost as long as war has raged in his native Syria.

He and his family fled bombings in 2012, thinking it would be a short, temporary stay. His hometown of Homs was under siege, and subject to a ferocious Syrian military campaign. He didn't even bring his ID with him.

After a decade of unfathomable violence and human tragedy that has made Syria the defining war of the early 21st century, the fighting has tapered off but the suffering hasn't.

U.S. President Joe Biden took office with promises of a return to diplomacy with Iran, but both sides' determination not to look weak has jeopardized prospects of a quick breakthrough.