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A Ukrainian security spokesman says government forces advanced to the outskirts of a key town in an effort to go after pro-Russian separatists in one of their main strongholds.
National security spokesman Andriy Lysenko said Ukrainian forces were outside Horlikva north of the main regional center of Donetsk.
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.”
Central African Republic’s mainly Muslim Seleka rebels signed a ceasefire with the “anti-balaka” Christian militia on Wednesday, after having dropped their demand for the country to be split in two along religious lines.
Seleka’s call for the country to be officially partitioned into a Muslim north and a Christian south risked derailing talks in Congo Republic aimed at ending religious violence that has killed thousands of people.