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Fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) say they have overrun a large Syrian military base on the outskirts of the city of Raqqa.
The Islamist fighters have released images of captured soldiers being beheaded after the battle for the base.
Israeli forces killed a leader of Islamic Jihad’s military wing and two of his sons early Friday with an airstrike on their home in the southern Gaza Strip, as the Palestinian death toll topped 800 in the battle’s 18th day. A 36-year-old reservist also fell in combat in Gaza’s north, the military said, bringing the number of Israeli soldiers killed over the past week to 33.
A statement from Islamic Jihad, which has been fighting Israel alongside the Islamist Hamas movement, said that Salah Abu Hassanein, 45 — a spokesman for its militia, Al-Quds Brigades — and his sons, aged 15 and 12, were killed in the entrance to their home in the southern city of Rafah.
Gazan authorities said Israeli forces shelled a shelter at a U.N.-run school on Thursday, killing at least 15 people as the Palestinian death toll in the conflict climbed over 760 and attempts at a truce remained elusive.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed his horror at the attack on the school at Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza strip. “Many have been killed – including women and children, as well as U.N. staff,” he said in a statement. “Circumstances are still unclear. I strongly condemn this act.”
In what would mark the bloodiest two days of fighting in the Syrian civil war, more than 700 people were reported killed in fighting between government and rebel forces loyal to the radical Islamic State (IS) — more than have been killed during the 15-day-old Gaza conflict that has dominated media attention in recent days.
The two-day death toll occurred last Thursday and Friday, with brutal fighting between forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and the IS that centered around a gas field, according to reports released this week from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based anti-Syrian government group that keeps tabs on the war’s dead.
Three Turkish soldiers and six militants of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), an offshoot of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), were killed during a clash on the Turkish-Syrian border, the Turkish army has said.
In a written statement released on Tuesday, the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) stated that Turkish soldiers conducting patrol duty near the town of Ceylanpınar, in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa, realized a group of 10 or 15 people was attempting to illegally cross over to the Turkish side from Syria late on Monday. After ignoring the warnings from troops to stop, the armed group opened fire on the soldiers and the troops on the border retaliated, the TSK said.