The Times of Israel liveblogged Friday’s events as they happened.

Channel 12 reports, without citing any sources, that a senior Emirati official phoned Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich last month when the far-right cabinet member was briefly in Dubai for a layover en route to a work trip in India.

During the call, the unnamed senior Emirati official tried to explain to Smotrich the importance of the Abraham Accords and what kinds of steps could put the agreements at risk, the network says, indicating that the finance minister did not internalize the lesson when he made his comments mocking Saudi Arabia earlier this week.

Channel 12 cites an unnamed senior Israeli official who claimed that Smotrich’s comments undid over six months of quiet work in Jerusalem to advance a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

In addition to Jordan, the UK, Germany, Denmark and Canada, whose flags were set up at the unveiling of the US-led Civil-Military Coordination Center earlier this week, Australia, France, Spain and the United Arab Emirates have also sent representatives to the hub in southern Israel being used to monitor and sustain the ceasefire in Gaza, a US official confirms to The Times of Israel.

Denmark is the only country joining the US that hasn’t recognized a Palestinian state, with many of the partners having done so in recent months.

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government threatened sanctions against those governments that took the step, those same countries are now empowered to play a role in the postwar management of Gaza, which is being headed by the US, not Israel.

New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader in the US House, endorses New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

“Assemblyman Mamdani has promised to focus on keeping every New Yorker safe, including the Jewish community that has confronted a startling rise in antisemitic incidents as well as Black and Latino neighborhoods that have battled deadly gun violence for years,” Jeffries says in a statement to The New York Times.

Jeffries had held off on endorsing Mamdani and his backing comes at the last minute. Early voting starts tomorrow and the general election is on November 4.

Despite the late endorsement, the move is likely to boost Mamdani and hurt his leading rival, the pro-Israel, centrist former governor Andrew Cuomo.

Jeffries had previously urged Mamdani to “reassure Jewish New Yorkers that he plans to prioritize their safety” and criticized Mamdani’s defense of the phrase, “Globalize the intifada.”

“With respect to the Jewish communities that I represent, I think our nominee is going to have to convince folks that he is prepared to aggressively address the rise in antisemitism,” Jeffries said of Mamdani earlier this year.

“Globalizing the intifada, by way of example, is not an acceptable phrase and he’s going to have to clarify his position on that as he moves forward,” Jeffries said. Mamdani has since said he would “discourage” use of the slogan.

Jewish leaders have issued a series of warnings about Mamdani this week, saying that his vilification of Israel could spur violence and hatred against Jews.

Jews in New York City are targeted in hate crimes far more than other groups.

Most of New York’s Democratic establishment has lined up behind Mamdani and including Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James.

The state’s Democratic Party chairman, Jay Jacobs, said last month that he would not endorse Mamdani due to his far-left politics and positions on Israel, in a rare break from Hochul.

New York’s senators, Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand, and the pro-Israel New York City Reps. Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres, have not made endorsements.

Cuomo picked up a significant late endorsement from his former rival, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, this week.

Israel has so far not received any further indications that Hamas intends to return the bodies of hostages to Israel tonight, The Times of Israel has learned.

Speculation of a potential return of hostage bodies came after Israel Police was reportedly ordered by security officials to prepare for such a possibility tonight.

Hamas has yet to announce that it intends to return the bodies of hostages to Israel today.

Currently, the bodies of 13 dead hostages remain held in Gaza.

Channel 12 reports, without citing any sources, that Defense Minister Israel Katz told US Vice President JD Vance during the latter’s visit earlier this week that 60 percent of Hamas’s tunnels across Gaza have not yet been destroyed.

The network speculates that half of those tunnels are located on the Israeli side of the Yellow Line, to which the IDF withdrew at the start of the ceasefire on October 10; that half of the tunnels will therefore be easier for Israel to neutralize in the coming weeks and months.

The IDF earlier this year estimated that it had destroyed just 25% of Hamas’s tunnels across the entire Strip since the beginning of the war. However, the military argues that the main focus has been on Hamas’s attack tunnels and those used as command centers or for weapons manufacturing — the vast majority of which have been destroyed — rather than on the numerous tunnels that Hamas uses to move around the Strip, especially in areas where ground troops never operated.

Letitia James, the New York attorney general who successfully prosecuted President Donald Trump, has pleaded not guilty to bank fraud charges.

James, one of three prominent Trump critics to be hit with criminal charges in recent weeks, entered the plea at an arraignment in a federal court in Norfolk, Virginia, Fox News and CNN say.

Hamas issues what it says is a joint statement from a group of “Palestinian factions,” announcing that they have agreed to have an independent committee of technocrats administer postwar Gaza.

The statement doesn’t appear to be a major development, given that Hamas has long stated that it was prepared to give up governing control of the Strip, while leaving the question of its weapons to separate discussions.

The statement also doesn’t mention whether Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party was included amid reports that Abbas ordered his aides to stay away from the sit-down over its inclusion of Hamas.

The Hamas statement also makes no mention of who will be sitting on the Palestinian technocratic committee, which will likely need approval from the US anyway. US officials indicated last week that filling the panel wasn’t at the top of their priorities.

With Gaza’s education system shattered by two years of gruelling war, UNICEF’s regional director says he fears for a “lost generation” of children wandering ruined streets with nothing to do.

“This is the third year that there has been no school,” Edouard Beigbeder, the UN agency’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, tells AFP in Jerusalem after returning from the Palestinian territory.

“If we don’t start a real transition for all children in February, we will enter a fourth year. And then we can talk about a lost generation.”

The destruction “is almost omnipresent wherever you go,” Beigbeder says.

“It is impossible to imagine 80 percent of a territory that is completely flattened out or destroyed,” he adds.

A US-brokered ceasefire, which came into effect earlier in October, has allowed UNICEF and other education partners to get about one-sixth of children who should be in school into temporary “learning centers,” Beigbeder tells AFP.

“They have three days of learning in reading, mathematics and writing, but this is far from a formal education as we know it,” he adds.

Beigbeder says that such learning centers, often located in schools or near displacement camps, consisted of metal structures covered with plastic sheeting or of tents.

He says there were sometimes chairs, cardboard boxes, or wooden planks serving as tables, and that children would write on salvaged slates or plastic boards.

“I’ve never seen everyone sitting properly,” he adds, describing children on mats or carpets.

Despite the ceasefire, Beigbeder says the situation for Gaza’s education system is catastrophic, with 85 percent of schools destroyed or unusable.

Of the buildings still standing, many are being used as shelters for displaced people, he says, with the situation compounded by the fact that many children and teachers are also on the move and looking to provide for their own families.

Gaza’s school system was already overcrowded before the conflict, with half the pre-war population under the age of 18.

Of the schools managed by the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority alone, Beigbeder says that some 80 out of 300 were in need of renovation.

He says 142 had been completely destroyed, while 38 were “completely inaccessible” because they were located in the area to which Israeli troops have withdrawn under the ceasefire.

American Airlines will resume direct flight services to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport from New York, starting on March 28, following a two-year hiatus due to the Gaza war.

Flights will operate daily on the route from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, deployed by Boeing 777-200ER aircraft. Tickets will go on sale by October 27, the US airline says in an emailed statement.

American Airlines suspended all flight services to and from Tel Aviv as the war broke out with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, following the terror group’s October 7, 2023, assault in southern Israel. During the war period, other foreign airlines have repeatedly canceled and resumed their flights to and from Israel.

US rival United Airlines resumed direct flights between Tel Aviv and Newark, NJ, near New York City, in July. US carrier Delta restarted its route between Tel Aviv and New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on September 1, with seven weekly flights.

The US State Department announces that longtime diplomat Steven Fagin will serve as the civilian lead of the Civil-Military Coordination Center in southern Israel, which is monitoring and sustaining the ceasefire in Gaza.

A career member of the Senior Foreign Service, Fagin has been US ambassador to the Republic of Yemen since May 2022. He was previously deputy ambassador at the US Embassy in Baghdad, principal officer at the US Consulate General in Erbil (2018-2020), director of the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs and director of the Regional Affairs Office in the State Department’s South and Central Asia Bureau.

Since joining the Foreign Service in 1997, he has also served abroad in Brussels, Islamabad, Astana, Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Minsk, Tbilisi and Cairo, along with stints in Washington as a Pakistan desk officer and special assistant to then-under secretary of state for political affairs Nick Burns.

The chief of Hezbollah’s logistics unit in southern Lebanon was killed in an Israeli drone strike earlier today, the IDF announces.

According to the military, Abbas Hassan Karaki was the head of logistics in the terror group’s so-called Southern Front. He held other senior roles in Hezbollah in recent years, the IDF says.

The IDF says Karaki “led and advanced efforts to rebuild” Hezbollah’s capabilities in southern Lebanon, along with restoring infrastructure that had been destroyed during the fighting last year.

Karaki was also responsible for “rebuilding the organization’s force structure and managing the transfer and storage of weapons in southern Lebanon,” the army says.

His actions “constituted a violation of the understandings between Israel and Lebanon,” the IDF adds.

Karaki was targeted while driving in the southern Lebanon town of Toul, near Nabatieh, earlier today.

צה"ל חיסל את מפקד הלוגיסטיקה של מפקדת 'חזית הדרום' בארגון הטרור חיזבאללה

צה"ל תקף מוקדם יותר היום, בהובלת פיקוד הצפון, באמצעות כלי טיס של חיל האוויר במרחב נבטיה שבדרום לבנון, וחיסל את המחבל עבאס חסן כרכי, מפקד הלוגיסטיקה של מפקדת 'חזית הדרום' בארגון הטרור חיזבאללה.

בתקופה… pic.twitter.com/5eJjpn4RIJ

— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) October 24, 2025

At least 14 people drowned when a rubber boat carrying migrants sank off Turkey’s western province of Mugla on Friday, the local governor’s office says, adding that a search and rescue operation was underway for possible survivors.

In a statement, the Mugla Governor’s Office says an Afghan man who survived the disaster and swam back to the mainland had raised the alarm shortly after 1 a.m.

The Afghan national told the emergency services that 18 people had set out on the rubber boat, but that shortly afterwards it had taken on water and sunk, the governor’s office says.

Search and rescue teams found a second survivor who had managed to reach Celebi Island off Bodrum. They also retrieved 14 bodies from the sea.

“Search and rescue efforts for other irregular migrants considered missing continue with four coast guard boats, one coast guard special diving team and one helicopter,” the governor’s office adds.

The Aegean Sea is a frequent transit route for thousands of migrants attempting to cross from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe, particularly from Turkey, which hosts millions of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The number of irregular migrants caught in Turkey peaked in 2019 with nearly 455,000 people, mainly from Afghanistan and Syria, according to the Presidency of Migration Management.

More than 122,000 migrants have been apprehended in Turkey as of October 16 this year.

They were freed in exchange for Israeli hostages held in Gaza, but instead of going home, 154 Palestinian ex-prisoners were exiled to Egypt, where they are confined to a hotel and kept under tight surveillance.

All of them had been sentenced by an Israeli military court to life in prison on charges of murder, belonging to Palestinian terror groups banned by Israel, and other acts of violence.

But when a ceasefire took effect in Gaza earlier this month, the group was put on buses and sent to Egypt, where authorities have put them in a five-star hotel that they cannot leave without clearance.

“We were separated from our families for 20 years,” Murad Abu al-Rub, a 45-year-old who spent two decades behind bars for murder, tells AFP.

Now, he is living in uncertainty and under close surveillance, far from the Palestinian city of Jenin, where he was born.

“No Arab........

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