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US Fighter Jets Arrive in Middle East to Enhance Air Operations

US F-15 fighter plane taking off at the Ovda military air base in southern Israel in 2017 (File- Reuters)
US F-15 fighter plane taking off at the Ovda military air base in southern Israel in 2017 (File- Reuters)
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US Fighter Jets Arrive in Middle East to Enhance Air Operations

US F-15 fighter plane taking off at the Ovda military air base in southern Israel in 2017 (File- Reuters)
US F-15 fighter plane taking off at the Ovda military air base in southern Israel in 2017 (File- Reuters)

The US Central Command said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that its F-15 fighter jets arrived in the Middle East.

"The 494th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft arrived in the US Central Command area of responsibility to bolster the US posture and enhance air operations throughout the Middle East," it said in its statement.

Earlier, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said "we've augmented U.S. fighter aircraft squadrons in the Middle East", stressing that "the US Department of Defense stands fully ready to deploy additional assets, if necessary."

The Palestinian movement Hamas launched its biggest assault on Israel in years, firing a barrage of rockets from Gaza and sending fighters across the border.

Israel said it was on a war footing and began its own strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza, with Israeli media reporting gunbattles between bands of Palestinian fighters and security forces in southern Israel.

For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to destroy Hamas in a televised address on Friday, warning that the fierce bombardment of Gaza was "only the beginning" of his country's response to the attacks by Hamas last week.

His threat came as thousands of Palestinians fled to southern Gaza in search of refuge after Israel warned them to evacuate ahead of a possible ground offensive in Gaza, where the death toll from Israeli air strikes has surged to at least 1,900, according to the local health ministry.

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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.