French President Emmanuel Macron will host a meeting with Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Paris on Wednesday, the French presidency said on Tuesday.

During the meeting, Macron will reaffirm France’s support for the construction of a “free, stable and sovereign Syria that respects all the components of the Syrian society,” the statement said.

The visit, the first for Sharaa to a European country since the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, is expected to address several security challenges faced by the new Syrian government, with particular emphasis on the repeated Israeli attacks on Syria’s sovereignty, according to the state-run Syrian news agency SANA.

Sharaa in February received an invitation from Macron to visit France, Reuters reported.

In January, Sharaa was named as interim president and pledged to form an inclusive transitional government that would build up Syria’s gutted public institutions and run the country until elections, which he said could take up to five years to hold.

Israel has escalated military operations in Syria since rebels ousted Assad in December, with bombings across the country and ground forces entering its southwest, while calling for Syria to remain decentralised and isolated, read the report.

It has framed its stance around its suspicion of Sharaa – who once headed a branch of al Qaeda before renouncing ties to the group in 2016 – and a desire to protect the Druze, a minority sect that is an offshoot of Islam with followers in Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday an expanded offensive against Palestinian militant group Hamas would be “intensive” after his security cabinet approved plans that may include seizing the Gaza Strip and controlling aid, Reuters reported.

However an Israeli defence official said the operation would not be launched before U.S. President Donald Trump concludes his visit next week to the Middle East.

The decision, after weeks of faltering efforts to agree a ceasefire with Hamas, underlines the threat that a war heaping international pressure on Israel amid dwindling public support at home could continue with no end in sight.

A report by Israel’s public broadcaster Kan, citing officials with knowledge of the details, said the new plan was gradual and would take months, with forces focusing first on one area of the battered enclave.

Netanyahu said in a video message the operation would be “intensive” and would see more Palestinians in Gaza moved “for their own safety”.

He said Israeli troops would not follow previous tactics based on short raids by forces based outside Gaza. “The intention is the opposite,” he said, echoing comments from other Israeli officials who have said Israel would hold on to the ground it has seized.

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff said Israel is a sovereign state that makes its own decisions, according to Axios, which also reported that he hopes for progress on a hostage and ceasefire deal before or during Trump’s visit. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Israeli troops have already taken over an area amounting to around a third of Gaza, displacing the population and building watchtowers and surveillance posts on cleared ground the military has described as security zones, but the new plan would go further.

One Israeli official said the newly approved offensive would seize the entire territory of the Gaza Strip, move its civilian population southward and keep humanitarian aid from falling into Hamas’ hands.

The defence official said aid distribution, which has been handled by international aid groups and U.N. organizations, would be transferred to private companies and handed out in the southern area of Rafah once the offensive begins.

The Israeli military, which throughout the war has shown little appetite for occupying Gaza, declined to comment on the remarks by government officials and politicians, read the report.

Israel resumed its offensive in March after the collapse of a U.S.-backed ceasefire that had halted fighting for two months. It has since imposed an aid blockade, drawing warnings from the UN that the 2.3 million population faces imminent famine.

The defence official said Israel would hold on to security zones seized along the Gaza perimeter because they were vital for protecting Israeli communities around the enclave.

But he said there was a “window of opportunity” for a ceasefire and hostage release deal during Trump’s visit.

“If there is no hostage deal, Operation “Gideon Chariots” will begin with great intensity and will not stop until all its goals are achieved,” he said.

Hamas official Mahmoud Mardawi rejected what he called “pressure and blackmail”.

“No deal except a comprehensive one, which includes a complete ceasefire, full withdrawal from Gaza, reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, and the release of all prisoners from both sides,” he said.

Israel has yet to present a clear vision for post-war Gaza after a campaign that has displaced most of Gaza’s population and left it depending on aid supplies that have been dwindling rapidly since the blockade.

Ministers have said that aid distribution cannot be left to international organizations which it accuses of allowing Hamas to seize supplies intended for civilians.

Instead, officials have looked at plans for private contractors to handle distribution, through what the United Nations has described as Israeli hubs.

On Monday, Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said on X that Israel was demanding that the U.N. and non-governmental organisations shut down their aid distribution system in Gaza, Reuters reported.

The decision to expand the operation was immediately hailed by Israeli government hardliners who have long pressed for a full takeover of the Gaza Strip by Israel and a permanent displacement of the population, along the lines of the “Riviera” plans outlined by Trump in February.

“We are finally going to conquer Gaza. We are no longer afraid of the word ‘occupation’,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told a pro-settler conference in an online discussion.

However, opinion polls show the Israeli public increasingly wants a deal to bring back the remaining 59 hostages still held in Gaza and there were angry scenes outside parliament with dozens of protesters scuffling with police.

“All the families are tired,” said Ruby Chen, whose son Itay was killed in the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. “All the families have been scared about this new manoeuvring because there is no guarantee that it will get us to where the families want.”

With Israel facing threats from the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, who on Sunday fired a missile that hit close to Ben Gurion Airport, an unstable Syria next door and a volatile situation in the occupied West Bank, the capacity for prolonged military operations also faces growing constraints.

Israel’s Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir said on Sunday that the military has already begun issuing tens of thousands of call-up orders for reservists, read the report.

A government spokesman said reserve soldiers were being called up to expand operations in Gaza, not to occupy it.

Zamir, who took office in March, has pushed back against calls by government hardliners who want to choke off aid entirely and has told ministers aid must be let in soon, according to Kan.

The war was triggered by the Hamas October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli tallies, and saw 251 taken hostage into Gaza.

Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has since killed more than 52,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians according to local health authorities, and left much of Gaza in ruins.

President Vladimir Putin said in remarks published on Sunday that Russia had sufficient strength and resources to take the war in Ukraine to its logical conclusion, though he hoped that there would be no need to use nuclear weapons.

Putin ordered thousands of Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022, triggering Europe’s biggest ground conflict since World War Two and the largest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the depths of the Cold War.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have been killed or injured and U.S. President Donald Trump, opens new tab has repeatedly said he wants to end the “bloodbath” that his administration casts as a proxy war between the United States and Russia.

In a film by state television about Putin’s quarter of a century as Russia’s paramount leader entitled “Russia, Kremlin, Putin, 25 years”, Putin was asked by a reporter about the risk of nuclear escalation from the Ukraine war.

“They wanted to provoke us so that we made mistakes,” Putin said, speaking beside a portrait of Tsar Alexander III, a 19th century conservative who suppressed dissent. “There has been no need to use those weapons … and I hope they will not be required.”

“We have enough strength and means to bring what was started in 2022 to a logical conclusion with the outcome Russia requires.”

Trump has been signalling for weeks that he is frustrated by the failure of Moscow and Kyiv to reach terms to end the war, though the Kremlin has said that the conflict is so complicated that the rapid progress Washington wants is difficult.

Former U.S. President Joe Biden, Western European leaders and Ukraine cast the invasion as an imperial-style land grab and repeatedly vowed to defeat Russian forces, which control about a fifth of Ukraine.

Putin portrays the war as a watershed moment in Moscow’s relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence.

Trump has warned that the conflict could develop into World War Three. Former CIA Director William Burns has said there was a real risk in late 2022 that Russia could use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, an assertion dismissed by Moscow.

Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who was handed the presidency on the last day of 1999 by an ailing Boris Yeltsin, is the longest serving Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin, who ruled for 29 years until his death in 1953.

Russian dissidents – most now either in jail or abroad – see Putin as a dictator who has built a brittle system of personal rule reliant on sycophancy and corruption that is leading Russia towards decline and turmoil.

Supporters cast Putin, who Russian pollsters say has approval ratings of above 85%, as a saviour who pushed back against an arrogant West and put an end to the chaos which accompanied the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union.

In the carefully choreographed state television film, which gave viewers a rare look behind the notoriously closed life of the Russian president, Putin was shown offering chocolates and a fermented Russian milk drink to Pavel Zarubin, a top Kremlin correspondent, in his private Kremlin kitchen.

Putin said that he first knelt in prayer during the 2002 Nord-Ost Moscow theater crisis, when Chechen militants took over 900 people hostage. More than 130 hostages were killed.

“I don’t feel like some kind of politician,” Putin said of his 25 years in power as president and prime minister.

“I continue to breathe the very same air as millions of Russian citizens. It is very important. God willing that it continues as long as possible. And that it doesn’t disappear.”