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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — An Iranian-American journalist who once worked for a U.S. government-funded broadcaster is believed to have been detained by Iran for months now, authorities said Sunday, further raising the stakes as Tehran threatens to retaliate over an Israeli attack on the country. The imprisonment of Reza Valizadeh, acknowledged to The Associated Press by the U.S. State Department, came as Iran marked the 45th anniversary of the American Embassy takeover and hostage crisis on Sunday. It also followed Iran's Supreme L...
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Israel launched airstrikes early Saturday on what it described as military targets in Iran in retaliation for a ballistic missile assault Oct. 1, officials said. There was no immediate information on damage in the Islamic Republic. The attack, threatened for weeks by Israel, comes as the Middle East sits on the precipice of a regional war more than a year after an initial attack by the militant group Hamas on Israel. In the time since, Israel has launched a devastating ground offensive in the Gaza Strip and an...
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel attacked military targets in Iran with pre-dawn airstrikes Saturday in retaliation for the barrage of ballistic missiles the Islamic Republic fired on Israel earlier this month. It was the first time Israel's military has openly attacked Iran. The Israeli military said its aircraft targeted facilities that Iran used to make the missiles fired at Israel as well as surface-to-air missile sites. Crucially, there was no indication that Iran's oil or nuclear sites were struck. Iran insisted the strikes caused only "...
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian won Iran's runoff presidential election Saturday, besting hard-liner Saeed Jalili by promising to reach out to the West and ease enforcement on the country's mandatory headscarf law after years of sanctions and protests squeezing the Islamic Republic. Pezeshkian promised no radical changes to Iran's Shiite theocracy in his campaign and long has held Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the final arbiter of all matters of state in the country. But even Pezeshkian's mode...
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iranians voted on Friday in a snap election to replace the late hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi, with the race's sole reformist candidate vowing to seek "friendly relations" with the West in an effort to energize supporters in a vote beset by apathy. Voters faced a choice between hard-line candidates and the little-known reformist Masoud Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon. As has been the case since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, women and those calling for radical change have been barred from running, while the v...
NEW YORK (AP) — Victims of Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel sued Iran, Syria and North Korea on Monday, saying their governments supplied the militants with money, weapons and know-how needed to carry out the assault that precipitated Israel's ongoing war in Gaza. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, seeks at least $4 billion in damages for "a coordination of extrajudicial killings, hostage takings, and related horrors for which the defendants provided material support and resources." Iran's mission to the United Nations declined t...
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Seemingly every afternoon in Iran's capital, police vans rush to major Tehran squares and intersections to search for women with loose headscarves and those who dare not to wear them at all. The renewed crackdown comes not quite two years since mass protests over the death Mahsa Amini after she was detained for not wearing a scarf to the authorities' liking. A United Nations panel has found that the 22-year-old died as a result of "physical violence" wrought upon her by the state. Amini's death set off m...
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A possible attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels on Monday targeted a ship further away from nearly all of the previous assaults they've launched in the Gulf of Aden, officials said, potentially part of a widening escalation by the group. The attack comes as the U.S. has sent the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower back home after an eight-month deployment in which it led the American response to the Houthi assaults. Those attacks have reduced shipping drastically through the route crucial to Asian, Middle East and European m...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Trucks carrying badly needed aid for the Gaza Strip rolled across a newly built U.S. pier and into the besieged enclave for the first time Friday as Israeli restrictions on border crossings and heavy fighting hindered the delivery of food and other supplies. The shipment is the first in an operation that American military officials anticipate could scale up to 150 truckloads a day, all while Israel presses in on the southern city of Rafah in its seven-month offensive against Hamas. At the White House, National Security C...
JERUSALEM (AP) — A warship — part of a U.S.-led coalition protecting shipping in the Mideast — intercepted an anti-ship ballistic missile fired over the Gulf of Aden on Wednesday, the American military said, marking a new attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels after a recent lull. The Houthis claimed the assault, which comes after a period of relatively few rebel attacks on shipping in the region over Israel's ongoing war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The explosion happened some 130 kilometers (80 miles) southeast of Djibouti in the Gulf of Aden, the B...
JERUSALEM (AP) — A U.S. Navy ship and several Army vessels involved in an American-led effort to bring more aid into the besieged Gaza Strip are offshore of the enclave and building out a floating platform for the operation, which the Pentagon said Monday will cost at least $320 million. Sabrina Singh, Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters the cost is a rough estimate for the project and includes the transportation of the equipment and pier sections from the U.S. to the Gaza coast, as well as the construction and aid delivery operations. Satelli...
JERUSALEM (AP) — Satellite photos taken Monday suggest an apparent Israeli retaliatory strike targeting Iran's central city of Isfahan hit a radar system for a Russian-made air defense battery, contradicting repeated denials by officials in Tehran of any damage in the assault. The strike on an S-300 radar in what appears to have been a very limited strike by the Israelis would represent far more damage done than in the massive drone-and-missile attack Iran unleashed against Israel on April 13. That may be why Iranian officials up to Supreme L...
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Commandos from Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard rappelled from a helicopter onto an Israeli-affiliated container ship near the Strait of Hormuz and seized the vessel Saturday in the latest attack between the two countries. The seizure followed a suspected Israeli strike this month on an Iranian consular building in Syria that killed 12 people, including a senior Guard general. Iran has promised to retaliate, and U.S. President Joe Biden cut short a weekend trip to his beach house in Delaware to r...
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran's direct attack on Israel over the weekend upended decades of its shadowy warfare by proxy, something Tehran has used to manage international repercussions for its actions. But with both economic and political tensions at home boiling, the country's Shiite theocracy chose a new path as changes loom for the Islamic Republic. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will mark his 85th birthday Friday, with no clear successor in sight and still serving as the final arbiter of every decision Iran makes. C...
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Officials saw the crescent moon Sunday night in Saudi Arabia, home to the holiest sites in Islam, marking the start of the holy fasting month of Ramadan for many of the world's 1.8 billion Muslims. The sacred month, which sees those observing abstain from food and water from sunrise to sunset, marks a period of religious reflection, family get-togethers and giving across the Muslim world. Seeing the moon Sunday night means Monday is the first day of the fast. Saudi state television reported that authorities t...
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A missile attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels on a commercial ship in the Gulf of Aden killed two of its crew members and forced survivors to abandon the vessel on Wednesday, officials said, in the first fatal strike in a campaign of assaults by the Iranian-backed group over Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The attack on the Barbados-flagged bulk carrier True Confidence further escalates the conflict on a crucial maritime route linking Asia and the Middle East to Europe that has disrupted global shipping....
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A ship attacked by Yemen's Houthi rebels has sunk in the Red Sea after days of taking on water, officials said Saturday, the first vessel to be fully destroyed as part of their campaign over Israel's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The sinking of the Rubymar, which carried a cargo of fertilizer and previously leaked fuel, could cause ecological damage to the Red Sea. Persistent Houthi attacks have already disrupted traffic in the crucial waterway for cargo and energy shipments moving from Asia and the M...
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Two ships traveling in Middle East waters were attacked by suspected Yemen Houthi rebel drones early on Tuesday, authorities said, the latest assaults in the Iranian-backed fighters' campaign of targeting vessels over Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The first attack happened in the southern part of the Red Sea, west of the Yemeni port of Hodeida, with the projectile causing "slight damage" to the vessel's windows on the bridge, the British military's United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said. A small v...
JERUSALEM (AP) — Satellite photos show new demolition along a 1-kilometer-deep path on the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, according an analysis by The Associated Press and expert reports. The destruction comes as Israel has said it wants to establish a buffer zone there, over international objections, further tearing away at land the Palestinians want for a state. The demolition along the path represents only a sliver of the wider damage from the Israel-Hamas war seen in Gaza, which one assessment suggests has damaged or destroyed half of all...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States on Wednesday attributed the drone attack that killed three U.S. service members in Jordan to the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias, as President Joe Biden weighs his options to respond to the strike. Iran threatened to "decisively respond" to any U.S. attack on the Islamic Republic after the U.S. said it held Tehran responsible. The U.S. has signaled it is preparing for retaliatory strikes in the Mideast in the wake of the Sunday drone attack that also wounded more than 4...
JERUSALEM (AP) — Yemen's Houthi rebels launched a missile Friday at a U.S. warship patrolling the Gulf of Aden, forcing it to shoot down the projectile, and struck a British vessel as their aggressive attacks on maritime traffic continue. The attack on the U.S. warship, the destroyer USS Carney, marked a further escalation in the biggest confrontation at sea the U.S. Navy has seen in the Middle East in decades, as Houthi missile fire set another commercial vessel ablaze Friday night. The Carney attack represents the first time the Houthis d...
JERUSALEM (AP) — Iran said Sunday it successfully launched three satellites into space with a rocket that had multiple failures in the past, the latest for a program that the West says improves Tehran's ballistic missiles. The launch comes as heightened tensions grip the wider Middle East over Israel's continued war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, sparking fears of a regional conflict. While Iran has not intervened militarily in the conflict, it has faced increased pressure within its theocracy for action after a deadly Islamic State suicide b...
JERUSALEM (AP) — Two American-flagged ships carrying cargo for the U.S. Defense and State departments came under attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels on Wednesday, officials said, with the U.S. Navy intercepting some of the incoming fire. The attacks on the container ships Maersk Detroit and Maersk Chesapeake further raise the stakes of the group's ongoing attacks on shipping through the vital Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The U.S. and the United Kingdom have launched multiple rounds of airstrikes seeking to stop the attacks. Meanwhile, Qatar, one of the w...
JERUSALEM (AP) — Iran is "very directly involved" in ship attacks that Yemen's Houthi rebels have carried out during Israel's war against Hamas, the U.S. Navy's top Mideast commander told The Associated Press on Monday. Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of the Navy's 5th Fleet, stopped short of saying Tehran directed individual attacks by the Houthis in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. However, Cooper acknowledged that attacks associated with Iran have expanded from previously threatening just the Persian Gulf and its Strait of Hormuz into water...
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Yemen's Houthi rebels vowed fierce retaliation Friday for American and British strikes against them, further raising the prospect of a wider conflict in a region already beset by Israel's war in Gaza. The bombardment — launched in response to a recent campaign of drone and missile attacks on commercial ships in the vital Red Sea — killed at least five people and wounded six, the Houthis said. As the bombing lit the predawn sky over multiple sites held by the Iranian-backed rebels, it forced the world to again...
