A North Korean rocket appears to have passed over Japan, the Japanese government said on Sunday, having dropped booster stages to the east and west of the country.
“The projectile launched from North Korea today appears to have passed over towards the Pacific,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement.
North Korea has said it was putting a satellite into space and but regional powers say Pyongyang is testing a missile designed to carry a warhead to U.S. territory.

Two rockets fired from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip slammed into open fields in southern Israel overnight, without causing any casualties or damage, the Israeli military said on Saturday.
“The two Qassam-type devices were fired from the northern Gaza Strip and landed in the western Negev,” a military spokeswoman said, referring to the crude, homemade rockets used by Palestinian armed groups.
Gaza militants have fired more than 160 rockets and mortar rounds on Israel since the end of a massive Israeli offensive at the turn of the year aimed at halting the projectiles, …

The nation’s top military officer said Sunday that Iran has enough nuclear material to make a bomb, but Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Tehran was not close to building a weapon.
Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program that he believed Iran had enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon.
“We think they do, quite frankly,” Mullen said.
A recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency found that Iran had built up its supplies of enriched uranium to slightly more …

Hamas officials said Friday that an announcement of an 18-month cease-fire with Israel was days away and would include a substantial opening of Gaza’s borders with Israel in exchange for an end to Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli southern communities. But a senior Israeli official said nothing had been agreed on yet.
Meanwhile, rockets were fired into Israel on Friday, causing no damage or injuries, and Israeli warplanes struck the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis, wounding two Popular Resistance Committee fighters.

Israel has launched several air raids against targets in southern Gaza near the border with Egypt, causing damages but no injuries, Palestinian security sources have said.
The strikes targeted “open areas” near the town of Rafah and tunnels along the border with Egypt, residents said.
An Israeli military spokesman confirmed that the “Israeli air force intervened in the Gaza Strip,” late on Friday.
“Our planes attacked four tunnels that were dug under the border with Egypt and used for weapons smuggling,” the spokesman told AFP news agency.

Israel threatened more strikes against Hamas on Monday hours after aircraft bombed Gaza in response to new rocket fire from the Islamist-ruled enclave.
Israeli aircraft late on Sunday targeted an empty police station in central Gaza and some seven tunnels along the Gaza Strip’s southern border with Egypt, witnesses said.
The action came two weeks after the end of an Israeli offensive that devastated the impoverished territory and left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead.

Israeli warplanes bombed a weapons production facility in Gaza on Thursday after militants fired a rocket at Israel, in violence that defied the efforts of a visiting U.S. peace envoy to reinforce a ceasefire.
There were no reports of injuries from the predawn Israeli strike in the town of Rafah, along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Witnesses and Hamas Islamists said a metal foundry was damaged.
Moments earlier, a militant group with links to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement claimed responsibility for firing a rocket at southern Israel late on Wednesday.

Israeli airstrikes have targeted the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt, as part of Israel’s response to an attack on one of its frontier patrols on Tuesday.
Residents near the town of Rafah fled as missiles hit tunnels through which Israel says militants smuggle arms.
The strikes came ahead of US envoy George Mitchell’s visit to promote a permanent Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
Both sides declared ceasefires on 17 and 18 January to end Israel’s three-week offensive on Gaza.

GENEVA (Reuters) – Israel’s invasion of Gaza has strengthened the hand of extremists and only a credible independent investigation into alleged wrongdoing can quieten growing Palestinian anger, a U.N. aid official said on Friday.
John Ging, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, called for new U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell to talk to ordinary people in Gaza as part of a “new track” in diplomacy.
U.S. President Barack Obama named Mitchell, a former U.S. Senator who helped settle the conflict in Northern Ireland, on Thursday to …

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Now that there is a cease-fire in place, Israelis are asking whether the 22-day war against Hamas in Gaza achieved its aims.
The government argues that overwhelming victory in the field will advance what was Operation Cast Lead’s primary goal: bringing a long period of quiet to civilians in southern Israel, freeing them from the tyranny of cross-border rocket attacks from Gaza.