Israel

Israel has found the bodies of three missing teenagers, accusing Hamas of their murder and vowing to make the Islamist movement pay.

"This evening, we found three bodies and all the signs indicate that they are the bodies of our three kidnapped youngsters," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told ministers at the start of an emergency session of his security cabinet on June 30.

Israeli forces found the bodies of three missing teenagers in the occupied West Bank on June 30 after a nearly three-week-long search and a sweep against the Islamist Hamas group that Israel says abducted them.

Khaleed Meshal, the political leader of Hamas, has called Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to inform him about the developments in the region and Israel’s operations in Gaza and the West Bank, Anadolu Agency reported June 30.

ISIS-led insurgents are creating an Islamic state out of the vast strips of land they control in Iraq and Syria, the militants have announced.

Its territory will extend from Syria's Aleppo, once the economic heart of the country, to the Diyala province in the east of Iraq.

Seizing on the mayhem in Iraq, Israel's prime minister on June 29 called for the establishment of an independent Kurdistan as part of a broader alliance with moderate forces across the region, and asserted that Israel would have to maintain a long-term military presence in the West Bank to keep a jihadi juggernaut from powering its way to the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
     

Israel told the United States on June 26 Kurdish independence in northern Iraq was a "foregone conclusion" and Israeli experts predicted the Jewish state would be quick to recognise a Kurdish state, should it emerge.

Israel offered Thursday to help moderate Arab nations threatened by a lightning offensive by Islamic militants in Iraq, as the country's top diplomat met with US Secretary of State John Kerry.
      

Iran has offered "rational proposals" in nuclear negotiations but "excessive demands" of the P5+1 world powers are likely to prevent agreement by the July 20 deadline, Tehran's foreign minister said Thursday.
      

Greece will invite major oil companies next month to conduct offshore test drillings, the government said on Wednesday, launching the debt-laden country’s most ambitious attempt so far to develop its untapped hydrocarbon potential.

Athens has made several fruitless attempts over the past decades to find big reserves of oil or natural gas.

Dozens of Palestinian prisoners who had refused food for 62 days have suspended their hunger strike after reaching a deal with the Israel Prisons Service, their lawyer told AFP.