Militants fired rockets from Gaza and Lebanon toward Israel on Thursday, following confrontations between Israeli police and Palestinian worshippers at a major Muslim shrine in Jerusalem for a second day in a row.

The escalation at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, which sits on the fault line of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, came during a volatile period in which the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and the Jewish holiday of Passover overlap. The shrine is in Jerusalem’s Old City, where Easter week rituals unfolded at the same time.

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South Sudanese soldiers arrived in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday, an AFP journalist saw, joining a regional military force in the region wracked by the M23 rebellion.

At least 45 soldiers touched down in the city of Goma in the late morning, with further contingents expected to arrive at later dates.

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Pakistan’s army said attackers from Iran killed four of its border patrol soldiers.

The soldiers were part of a routine border patrol operating along the Pakistan-Iran border when fighters attacked in the Jalgai sector of Kech district, the military said in a statement on Saturday.

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Oleksii Reznikov, Minister of Defence of Ukraine, has said that the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is planning to conduct a counter-offensive on several fronts, but it all depends on the weather conditions.

The Ukrainian troops are also waiting for the “right moment”, and Reznikov believes it will happen in April or May.

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Attacks by Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia whose sovereignty claim has no international recognition, have caused over 1,500 injuries since February 6 in Las Anod, which is at the heart of the movement to reunify the Sool, Sanaag and Cayn (SSC) with Somalia

Somaliland is a self-proclaimed republic, with no international recognition, formed in 1991 as a separatist state, breaking away from Somalia’s northwestern region after the civil war. It spans over a strip of land of almost 285,000 square kilometers along the south of the Gulf of Aden – a crucial shipping route, including for petroleum, connecting the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea. It is now facing what many observers regard as an existential threat as the unionist movement for reunification with Somalia spreads across Sool, Sanaag and Cayn (SSC), which is over a third of what Somaliland regards as its territory.

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