Middle East

THE WASHINGTON POST: Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner’s trip was planned in advance of Israeli strikes across Gaza, launched after two Israeli soldiers were killed in Rafah.

US special envoy Steve Witkoff and the US president's son-in-law Jared Kushner are visiting Israel to shore up a tenuous ceasefire after a weekend of violence in the Gaza Strip.

Israel has launched a wave of attacks on Gaza after accusing Palestinian militants of attacking its forces across cease-fire lines.

Thousands of Palestinians have returned to Gaza City to find their neighbourhoods destroyed and lives in limbo, as a fragile ceasefire halts the fighting but offers little clarity about what comes next.

The Israeli military says the ceasefire in Gaza has resumed after an attack that killed two of its soldiers and prompted a wave of airstrikes that killed 26 people.

The US has issued a stark warning after receiving credible reports Hamas is preparing an attack on Gaza civilians, calling it a grave ceasefire breach.

Plans to reopen Gaza’s main border crossing have been abruptly halted, as tensions grow over the delayed return of hostage bodies under the fragile ceasefire deal.

Israel has received the coffin of another missing hostage which was handed over to the Red Cross by Hamas.

The Albanese Government says it’s appropriate for Australia’s military to prepare contingency plans to deploy troops to the Middle East.

BEN HARVEY: If peace in our time turns into peace for all time MAGA-hating progressives will have to face a spectacle they’ll find just as horrifying as the war in Gaza: Trump receiving a Nobel Peace Prize.

Turkey has deployed dozens of disaster relief specialists to help search for bodies under the mountains of rubble in Gaza.

Australia is preparing military contingency plans to deploy troops to the Middle East, but Defence Minister Pat Conroy says no request has been made by the Trump Administration yet.

US President Donald Trump has been forced to clarify that the US military would not be the ones enforcing his earlier threat regarding Hamas’s internal violence. 

Both nations announced the ceasefire after a week of deadly clashes along their border and strikes on the Afghan capital threatened to spill into a broader conflict.

Hamas has returned two more hostage bodies and admitted they can’t locate more, as US President Donald Trump warns Hamas will be ‘straightened out quickly’ if it fails to honour the Gaza ceasefire.