Israel Financial News

Alphabet is in advanced talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for roughly $23 billion, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Sunday. A deal could come together soon, the source said, requesting anonymity as the discussions are confidential.

Gaza Strip: Hamas said Sunday that Gaza cease-fire talks continue and the group's military commander is in good health, a day after the Israeli military targeted Mohammed Deif with a massive airstrike that local health officials said killed at least 90 people, including children. Deif's condition remained uncertain after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday night «there still isn't absolute certainty» he was killed. Hamas representatives gave no evidence to back up their assertion about the health of a chief architect of the Oct. 7 attack that sparked the war. The Israeli military on Sunday announced that Rafa Salama, a Hamas commander it described as one of Deif's closest associates, had been killed in Saturday's strike. Salama commanded Hamas' Khan Younis brigade. The statement gave no update on Deif, who has long topped Israel's most-wanted list and has been in hiding for years.

Gautam Adani plans to build a port in Vietnam as the Indian conglomerate seeks to develop infrastructure overseas to tap opportunities from increasing trade. Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Ltd. has secured an “in-principle approval from the Vietnamese government” for a greenfield development in Da Nang, Karan Adani, managing director of the company, said in an interview. The project, which will have container terminals and multipurpose berths to handle various types of cargo, is at an early stage of planning and the total investment required hasn’t been finalized yet, he said. This will be the fourth international port asset for the Adani group after Haifa in Israel, Colombo in Sri Lanka and the Port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. On Friday, Adani’s new mega port in southern India saw the arrival of its maiden mother ship and the company wants to accelerate the expansion of the facility in a bid to grab a bigger share of the international maritime trade that’s currently dominated by China.

Delta Air Lines is changing its employee uniform policy following a passenger’s outrage over two flight attendants photographed wearing Palestinian pins

Red Sea crisis and ongoing war between Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas. E-commerce exports are growing rapidly and those done through the postal and courier routes are pegged at $1.5 billion. Here's a look at the challenges the export sector is facing and its budget wishlist. India's goods and services exports in FY24 were at an all-time high of $778.2 billion, up 0.23% from $776.4 billion in 2022-23 (goods USD 437.1 billion and services USD 341 billion). Key issues in India's export saga;

Masoud Pezeshkian won Iran's runoff presidential election Saturday, besting hard-liner Saeed Jalili by promising to reach out to the West and ease enforcement on the country's mandatory headscarf law after years of sanctions and protests squeezing the Islamic Republic. Pezeshkian promised no radical changes to Iran's Shiite theocracy in his campaign and long has held Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the final arbiter of all matters of state in the country. But even Pezeshkian's modest aims will be challenged by an Iranian government still largely held by hard-liners, the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, and Western fears over Tehran enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade levels.

Argentina designated Hamas a terrorist organisation on Friday and ordered a freeze on the financial assets of the Palestinian group, a largely symbolic move as President Javier Milei seeks to align Argentina strongly with the US and Israel. Announcing the decision, Milei's office cited the militant Palestinian group's cross-border attack on Israel last October 7 that killed some 1,200 people and took 250 others hostage, in the deadliest assault in Israel's 76-year history. The statement also mentioned Hamas' close ties to Iran, which Argentina blames for two deadly militant attacks on Jewish sites in the country. The move comes just days before the 30th anniversary of one of those attacks, the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. It killed 85 people and wounded hundreds more in the worst such attack in Argentina's modern history.

A suspected attack by Yemen’s Houthi rebels has targeted a Liberian-flagged tanker in the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait

conflict on the Lebanon-Israel border, the daily exchanges of strikes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces have sparked fires that are tearing through forests and farmland on both sides of the frontline. The blazes — exacerbated by supply shortages and security concerns — have consumed thousands of hectares of land in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, becoming one of the most visible signs of the escalating conflict. There is an increasingly real possibility of a full-scale war — one that would have catastrophic consequences for people on both sides of the border. Some fear the fires sparked by a larger conflict would also cause irreversible damage to the land.

Hamas has accepted a U.S. proposal to begin talks on releasing Israeli hostages, including soldiers and men, 16 days after the first phase of an agreement aimed at ending the Gaza war, a senior Hamas source told Reuters on Saturday. The militant Islamist group has dropped a demand that Israel first commit to a permanent ceasefire before signing the agreement, and would allow negotiations to achieve that throughout the six-week first phase, the source told Reuters on condition of anonymity because the talks are private.

Al-Nuseirat in central Gaza on Saturday, the territory's health ministry and the official Palestinian news agency said. The Israeli military said it was looking into the report. The health ministry said the attack on the school killed at least 16 people and wounded more than 50.

Gaza, including two children at a home and at least one United Nations worker, Palestinian hospital officials and first responders said, even as stalled cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas show signs of renewed momentum. Four out of every five people in Gaza — nearly 2 million Palestinians — have been driven into the territory's center by expanding Israeli military offensives and evacuation orders, the army estimated earlier this week. Civilians are taking shelter in makeshift tent camps and crowded urban areas, and many have been displaced multiple times. Violence also flared Friday in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces killed seven people in a raid and an airstrike, according to Palestinian health officials. And on the Israel-Lebanon border, rockets fired by militant group Hezbollah lightly wounded two Israeli soldiers, the army said, as concerns grow that these low-level clashes could escalate into a wider regional war.

Hamas official told Friday the group expects a swift Israeli response — «likely today or tomorrow morning» — to its new «ideas» for halting the Gaza war and freeing hostages. With Israeli negotiators scheduled to arrive in Qatar for talks with mediators, Osama Hamdan insisted that the group's military wing remains «in a good condition» to keep up the nine-month-old war. Hamdan said there were no new concrete proposals in a document sent to Israel this week but «some ideas were proposed to overcome» Israeli reticence about a ceasefire.

Hezbollah, has been using some low-tech strategies to try to evade its foe's sophisticated surveillance technology, informed sources told Reuters. It has also been using its own tech — drones — to study and attack Israel's intelligence gathering capabilities in what Hezbollah's leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has described as a strategy of «blinding» Israel. The sides have been trading fire since Hezbollah's Palestinian ally in the Gaza Strip, Hamas, went to war with Israel in October. While the fighting on Lebanon's southern border has remained relatively contained, stepped-up attacks in recent weeks have intensified concern it could spiral into a full-scale war.

Hamas has given initial approval for a US-backed proposal for a phased cease-fire deal in Gaza, dropping a key demand that Israel gives an up-front commitment for a complete end to the war, a Hamas and an Egyptian official said Saturday. The apparent compromise by the militant group — which controlled Gaza before triggering the war with an October 7 attack on Israel — could help deliver the first pause in fighting since last November and set the stage for further talks on ending a devastating nine-month war. But all sides cautioned that a deal is still not guaranteed. The two officials, who spoke on conditions of anonymity to discuss the ongoing negotiations, said Washington's phased deal will first include a «full and complete» six-week cease-fire that would see the release of a number of hostages, including women, the elderly and the wounded, in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

Israeli forces deepened an operation in the Gaza Strip's largest city in what the military said was meant to weed out militants, sending thousands of Palestinians fleeing on Monday from an area already ravaged in the early weeks of the nine-month-long war. The incursion into the eastern part of Gaza City expands Israel's engagement in the northern part of the beleaguered territory, an area Israel said it had seized control of months ago yet which has seen pockets of militant resurgence that have scaled back Israeli military gains and drawn forces back into such operations. Israel had ordered evacuations in the area before the raid was launched, the military said. Heavy fighting in the area in the initial weeks of the war all but emptied out Gaza City and its environs, and the Israeli military has prevented most people from returning to their homes there. But several hundred thousands of Palestinians remain in the area, living in the shells of their homes or shelters. The fresh fighting meant new displacement for many residents there.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels likely fired an Iranian-made anti-ship cruise missile at a Norwegian-flagged tanker in the Red Sea in December, an assault that now provides a public, evidence-based link between the ongoing rebel campaign against shipping and Tehran

Britain heads to the polls Thursday, and talk about another election gamble that hasn’t paid off. In the same way President Biden hoped Americans wouldn’t notice his age and Emmanuel Macron assumed the French would rebuff the insurgent right, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak thought—wrongly—that a summer election would focus voters on his virtues. In the event, voters still are trying to figure out what those virtues are supposed to be.

An attack by Yemen’s Houthi rebels has targeted a ship in the Gulf of Aden

Liberal Member of Parliament Anthony Housefather is denouncing a poster that appeared on a Montreal lamppost asking him to “get out of Canada.”

Modarres military base and the Khojir missile production complex near Tehran, as reported by Reuters. Key Sites and Developments The imagery from Planet Labs shows structures surrounded by large dirt berms, which are typical for missile production to prevent explosions from spreading. Jeffrey Lewis from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey noted that construction at Khojir began in August last year, while Modarres' expansion started in October.