For journalist Amer Matar, a decade-long search for his younger brother has defined him and changed the course of his life, now dedicated to researching and documenting crimes committed by the Islamic State group in Syria.

His brother, Mohammed Nour Matar, vanished in Syria's northern city of Raqqa in 2013 while reporting on an explosion that hit the headquarters of an insurgent group. His burnt camera was found at the scene of the blast, and his family soon after got word he was in an IS prison. But there has been no other sign of him since.

Everyone worried this might happen.

In the weeks before a rare confluence of major Jewish, Christian and Muslim holidays, with tens of thousands of visitors expected in Jerusalem for the first time since the pandemic, Israeli, Palestinian and Arab leaders discussed how to calm tensions.

When Ghada Sabatien set out to visit her uncle in a village near Bethlehem, she was not expecting to be caught up in the spike in violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

But the unarmed 45-year-old, who was partially sighted and understood little Hebrew, bled to death in the street after "mistakenly" being shot by an Israeli soldier.

Recent deadly attacks by Palestinians have shown a shift in the dynamics of militancy in the West Bank, as armed factions play less of a role and individual grievances trump ideology, analysts say.

At a bustling market in the Palestinian political headquarters of Ramallah, customers clamor to get their hands on the latest hot trend. 

Iranian intelligence officers arrested three people belonging to a group linked to Israel's Mossad agency and charged with involvement in releasing classified information, state TV reported Thursday.

The report said they were arrested in the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchistan province but didn't identify them or how they had access to classified information.

Palestinian militants fired volleys of rockets from Gaza into Israel, which responded with air strikes in the early hours of Thursday in the biggest escalation since an 11-day war last year.

A rocket from Gaza on Wednesday evening fell harmlessly in a garden in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, police said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has urged Israeli and Palestinian leaders to "end the cycle of violence" after a sharp escalation in tensions between the two sides in recent days.

A group of Israeli ultra-nationalists said it is determined to go ahead with a flag-waving march around predominantly Palestinian areas of Jerusalem's Old City later Wednesday, brushing aside a police ban of an event that served as one of the triggers of last year's Israel-Gaza war.

In a sign of the already heated atmosphere, a small group of Palestinian protesters threw rocks at police while hundreds of Jewish visitors entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.

Churches in Jerusalem are up in arms against Jewish "radicals" who are settling in the Christian Quarter and threatening a fragile religious balance in the ancient Holy City.

"We have a major problem here," said Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilus III in Jerusalem's Old City, which is split into historic Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Armenian quarters.

During a visit to Syria in 2017, Vladimir Putin lavished praise on a Syrian general whose division played an instrumental role in defeating insurgents in the country's long-running civil war. The Russian president told him his cooperation with Russian troops "will lead to great successes in the future."

Now members of Brig. Gen. Suheil al-Hassan's division are among hundreds of Russian-trained Syrian fighters who have reportedly signed up to fight alongside Russian troops in Ukraine, including Syrian soldiers, former rebels and experienced fighters who fought for years against the Islamic State group in Syria's desert.