Israel’s foreign minister set to rejoin Netanyahu’s Likud party

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could get a boost in the country’s next election after Gideon Saar’s New Hope party signed an agreement to merge with the ruling Likud party.

Saar was once a prominent member of Likud but left years ago after accusing Netanyahu of turning it into a “cult of personality.” After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack, Saar joined Netanyahu’s coalition but later quit and returned to the opposition. In September, his party joined again, expanding Netanyahu’s majority in parliament, and shortly after, Saar was appointed foreign minister.

Through the merger, Saar will bring his small base of support to Likud in the next elections, set to take place in 2026.

The Israeli military said its air force conducted an intelligence-based strike on a command center belonging to Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists in Damascus. It added that command center was used to plan and direct terrorist activities by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad against Israel.

Defense Minister Israel Katz warned in a statement that “whenever terrorist activity is organized against Israel,” Syria’s new President Ahmad al-Sharaa “will find air force planes circling above him and attacking terrorist targets.”

Israel says it has sent 10,000 packages of food aid to Syria’s Druze, as it seeks to forge ties with the minority to shape the country’s troubled transition from civil war.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the operation was conducted in recent weeks in coordination with local Druze leaders, with most of the aid delivered to the overwhelmingly Druze southern region of Sweida.

Israel says it is supporting an embattled minority in a country now ruled by Islamists.

Israel seized a buffer zone in southern Syria shortly after President Bashar Assad’s overthrow and has carried out waves of airstrikes to destroy Syria’s military. It has ordered the new security forces not to operate south of the capital, Damascus.

Meanwhile, United Nations-backed experts on Thursday accused Israel of “the systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other gender-based violence” in its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Israel’s mission to the U.N. in Geneva rejected the allegations and accused the The Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which was created by the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council, of relying on “second-hand, single, uncorroborated sources.”

Israel has refused to cooperate with the commission, accusing it and the council of being biased against it.

The war began when Hamas-led terrorists attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages. A U.N. envoy last year said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed rape and sexual violence in the attack.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not say how many of the dead were combatants.