Middle East

Newsbreak -   Iran on Sunday said it would begin treating American college campuses in the Middle East as “legitimate targets” for its military after it said U.S.-Israeli strikes earlier this week hit Isfahan University of Technology and Tehran University of Science and Technology.

“The reckless rulers of the White House should know that from now on, all universities of the occupying regime and American universities in the West Asia region are legitimate targets for us until two universities are struck in retaliation for the Iranian universities that have been destroyed,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps wrote in a Sunday statement on the social platform X.

NPR - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last night that he is expanding his invasion of Lebanon. Officials say over a million people in Lebanon have been displaced and more than 1,200 people have been killed. On Saturday, among those killed were three Lebanese journalists covering the Israeli invasion of their country’s south....

Last week, Israeli officials said they would take Lebanese territory up to the Litani River, which sits 10-20 miles north of the current borders. A few days later, they ordered residents to evacuate a zone extending about 10 miles beyond that, north of the Zahrani River. Now, the prime minister’s latest announcement has caused more confusion and fear in the area. Israel says it wants to create a buffer zone so Hezbollah cannot fire rockets across the border into northern Israel, which Hezbollah continues to do. Israel occupied the zone in the 1980s and '90s, and many who live there fear history could be repeating itself. The critical Strait of Hormuz remains closed to almost all oil tankers. Meanwhile, an additional 2,000 U.S. troops have reached the Middle East, and more are on the way. Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have also joined the war. President Trump says negotiations with Iran are going well, and that Tehran will allow 20 oil tankers to pass through the strait today "out of respect."