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President Donald Trump said he's considering military options in Iran and following through on his threat to attack the Iranian regime after anti-government protests in the country have turned increasingly deadly.

"The military is looking at it, and we're looking at some very strong options. We'll make a determination," Trump told reporters Jan. 11 aboard Air Force One as he returned to Washington after spending the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Protests in Iran, which have entered their third week, have resulted in hundreds of deaths, drawing the condemnation of human rights organizations.

"Well, they’re starting to ‒ it looks like it," Trump said when asked if Iran has crossed a red line. "There seems to be some people killed who weren’t supposed to be killed. These are violent ‒ you can call them leaders, I don’t know if they’re leaders. I guess they rule with violence. But we’re looking at it very seriously."

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Israeli strikes across Gaza have killed at least 13 people, according to health officials, as U.S. President Donald Trump was expected to announce his Board of Peace to oversee the fragile ceasefire.

Health officials and family members said at least one child was among the dead in northern Gaza following several strikes there as well as east of Gaza City. All 13 people were killed on Thursday.

Israel’s army said Friday that it struck Hamas infrastructure and fighters in southern and northern Gaza in response to a failed projectile launched by militants from the Gaza City area.

The phased ceasefire between Israel and Hamas remains in its initial stage as efforts continue to recover the remains of the final Israeli hostage in Gaza.

Officials say that Trump is expected to announce next week his appointments to his Board of Peace, which he has said he will head, marking an important step forward for his Middle East peace plan. The process has moved slowly since a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect nearly three months ago.

The U.S. official and another official spoke on condition of anonymity pending a formal announcement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov would be the board’s “designated” director-general. Mladenov is a former Bulgarian defense and foreign minister who served as the U.N. envoy to Iraq before being appointed as the U.N. Mideast peace envoy from 2015-2020. During that time, he had good working relations with Israel and frequently worked to ease Israel-Hamas tensions.

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A video circulating on social media shows dozens of masked men dressed in black hitting and kicking a man on the ground. Israeli settlers beat a 67-year-old man, Basim Saleh Yassin, as he was trying to flee a plant nursery in the West Bank.

The footage shows Yassin running from a group of masked men before falling down. One man kicks him, and another hits him twice with what appears to be a stick. Yassin stays on his knees as he's struck again and then places his hands on the ground. As the men are leaving, one kicks him in the head while others strike him again until he's seen lying on the pavement.

The workers in the German-Palestinian-run nursery fled when they saw the Israeli settlers approaching, however, Yassin is deaf and could not hear the warnings, his family member said, per a report by the Associated Press.

Yassin sustained injuries to his face, chest and back. He was in the hospital with broken bones in his hand, witnesses said.
This is one of many incidents related to rising cases of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that the perpetrators are a "handful of extremists", but for Palestinians, the problem is far greater, as attacks have become a daily occurrence.

Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in the 1967 war and has since settled over 500,000 Jews in the West Bank.

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A Ukrainian drone strike sparked a fire at an oil depot in Russia's southern Volgograd region, officials said Saturday, after Russia launched a powerful hypersonic missile along with drones and other weapons that disrupted Kyiv's power supply and heating.

There were no immediate reports of casualties, Volgograd Gov. Andrei Bocharov was quoted as saying in a Telegram post published on the channel of the local administration. The post did not specify the damage, but said that people living near the depot may have to be evacuated.

Ukraine's General Staff said Saturday it had struck the Zhutovskaya oil depot overnight. In a statement on Telegram, it said the depot is supplying fuel to Russian forces, adding that damage was being assessed.

Ukraine's long-range drone strikes on Russian energy sites aim to deprive Moscow of the oil export revenue it needs to pursue its full-scale invasion. Russia wants to cripple the Ukrainian power grid, seeking to deny civilians access to heat, light and running water in what Kyiv officials say is an attempt to "weaponize winter."

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Greenland’s party leaders on Friday rejected President Trump’s continued push to take over the self-autonomous Arctic territory.

“We don’t want to be Americans, we don’t want to be Danes, we want to be Greenlanders,” Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen and four party leaders said in a statement Friday night, according to The Associated Press.

It comes as the Trump administration continues to float using military force to take over Greenland while also considering purchasing land from Denmark. The U.S. already has a military base there but the White House has said President Trump’s goal is to have more control, citing national security.

“Greenland’s future must be decided by the Greenlandic people,” the territory’s party leaders wrote on Friday.

“As Greenlandic party leaders, we would like to emphasize once again our wish that the United States’ contempt for our country ends,” their statement says.

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At least four tankers, most of them loaded, that had departed from Venezuela in early January in "dark mode" — or with their transponders off amid a strict U.S. blockade — are now back in the South American country’s waters, according to state company PDVSA and monitoring service TankerTrackers.com.

A flotilla of about a dozen loaded vessels and at least three other empty ships left Venezuelan waters last month in apparent defiance of an embargo imposed by President Donald Trump since mid-December, which has dragged down the country’s oil exports to minimum.

One of the ships, the Panama-flagged supertanker M Sophia, was intercepted and seized by the U.S. this week when returning to the country; while another, the Aframax tanker Olina with a flag from Sao Tome And Principe, was intercepted but released to Venezuela on Friday, state company PDVSA said.

Three more of the vessels that had departed in that flotilla, Panama-flagged Merope, Cook Islands-flagged Min Hang and Panama-flagged Thalia III, were spotted by Tankertrackers.com in Venezuelan waters late on Friday through satellite images.

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