Eight Palestinian athletes taking part in the Paris Olympics will be symbols of "resistance" during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, a Palestinian minister said Sunday as the official delegation left the occupied West Bank.
This will be the eighth time Palestinian athletes have taken part in the Olympics since 1996, but Olympic committee head Jibril Rajoub said the athletes had never felt so much attention.
Israeli police shot dead a car driver who ran down four soldiers at a bus stop near a military base on Sunday, police and army spokesmen said.
Police called it a "suspected terrorist attack" and said the driver, a Palestinian from east Jerusalem, had been "neutralised" during the incident close to the Tzrifin military base near the central city of Lod.
A military statement said one officer and a soldier were "severely injured" in the incident and two others also hurt.
A Hamas official said Sunday that the Palestinian group was withdrawing from Gaza truce talks, as Israeli bombardments hit a school a day after a deadly strike targeting the militant commander Mohammed Deif.
Speaking after the strike on southern Gaza's Al-Mawasi, which the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said killed at least 92 people, a senior official from Iran-backed Hamas cited Israeli "massacres" as a reason for suspending negotiations.
A Syrian soldier was killed Sunday and three others wounded in Israeli strikes on several positions in and around Damascus, Syrian state media said.
The Israeli military, meanwhile, said it had targeted a Syrian military command centre as well as targets and infrastructure belonging to the Syrian army and air defence in response to two drones launched towards Israel from Syrian territory.
Comedian Ayman Nahas said he has kept a "low profile" since October 7, fearing reprisals as an Arab artist in Israel while the country wages war in the Gaza Strip.
He is one of many Arab artists in Israel or annexed east Jerusalem who describe facing increasing hostility and harassment, and fearing looming funding cuts or arrests.
"You never know where your place is and that is not the right atmosphere to perform," said Nahas, who is also the artistic director at the Arabic-language Sard theatre in Haifa, in Israel's north.
Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif has become a master at eluding Israeli attempts on his life and he may have made it seven out of seven when artillery and fighter jets pounded a suspected hideout on Saturday.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged hours after an attack in southern Gaza that there was "no certainty" that Deif and one of his deputies, Rafa Salama, had been killed.
Israel had declared Al-Mawasi a "safe zone" as it pushed into Rafah near the Egyptian border, but on Saturday Palestinians raced to collect dozens of casualties from the military's latest strike.
Sirens wailed and women screamed as children were pulled bloody and unmoving from the wreckage.
"What have they done? they're children, children," one woman cried. "Seven-year-old and 12-year-old children."
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday announced the imminent end of his government's operations against Kurdish PKK fighters in northern Iraq and Syria.
Turkey began its Operation Claw-Lock in April 2022, claiming it needed to secure its border with northern Iraq, from where it accused Kurdish separatists of launching attacks on Turkish territory.
"We will very soon complete the lockdown of the area of operation in northern Iraq," Erdogan said, adding that Kurdish forces were now "incapable of acting inside our borders".
Israel said there was "no certainty" it killed Hamas's military chief Mohammed Deif in a strike Saturday on southern Gaza, where officials reported at least 90 killed in a displacement camp.
The Israeli military said it had targeted Deif and Rafa Salama, a brigade commander, calling them "two of the masterminds of the October 7 massacre" which sparked the war, now in its 10th month.
The pair's fate remained unclear, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying late on Saturday there was "no certainty" that either man was killed in the strike.
Iran's president-elect Masoud Pezeshkian said he looks forward to improved relations with European nations, even though he accused them of reneging on commitments to mitigate the impact of US sanctions.
Pezeshkian won a runoff election against ultraconservative former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili last week.
The 69-year-old has called for "constructive relations" with Western countries to "get Iran out of its isolation", and favours reviving the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and global powers.
