It's perhaps the most dramatic wound inflicted on the Gaza Strip by Israel's military campaign over the past three years: The city of Rafah, once home to a quarter million people, has been erased.

Satellite imagery shows the Israeli military has systematically razed the southern city and other towns and districts to the ground and in some places plowed away the rubble. Demolition, using bulldozers and explosives, has continued unabated since the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal reached a year ago, as the military solidifies its hold over the around 60% of the territory that it still controls.

Israelis gathered on Wednesday to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack that killed 1,200 people, saw 251 taken hostage, and sparked a devastating war in Gaza that has left much of the territory in ruins and its 2 million people living in dire conditions.

In southern Israel, families mourned at intersections, bomb shelters, and the site of a music festival that the militants overran three years ago in the deadliest attack against Israel. It is the first anniversary that all the hostages are home, marking a new stage of grief.

Israeli bulldozers on Tuesday demolished a five-story residential building in annexed east Jerusalem which was home to about 70 people, in a move the local Palestinian authority said was aimed at "forcible transfer".

Mediator Qatar on Tuesday said the United States and Iran were still engaged in talks to end the Middle East war, despite an apparent deadlock seven months into the conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made guaranteeing Israel's security his core doctrine, but now his leadership hangs in the balance with critics accusing him of failing to protect his country from attack.

On Israel's border with Lebanon where Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets and drones, previous backers of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu say they are rethinking how they will vote in the first election since the war.

"Many I know were right-wing and were Bibi supporters, and today they're not," said plant nursery owner Sigal Malachi, using a nickname for Israel's longest-serving premier.

A professor at an Israeli university has been indicted for allegedly planning attacks aimed at killing hundreds of Arab Israelis and Palestinians in a bid to force them to flee into neighboring countries, prosecutors announced on Monday.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that negotiations with the United States were "meaningless" and only resulted in renewed attacks, state media reported, with progress on ending the Middle East war stalled for months.

Turkey and Pakistan will undertake a "rapid deployment" of troops to Saudi Arabia as part of a new mutual defense alliance, the three countries said Monday, as the Gulf kingdom faces escalating attacks from Yemen's Houthis.

Yemen's Houthis claimed an attack on the main airport in the Saudi capital while also denying on Tuesday losing territory to government forces, as fighting intensified.