The State Department is allowing non-essential personnel working at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem to leave Israel ahead of possible strikes on Iran. The embassy announced the decision early Friday morning and said that “in response to security incidents and without advance notice” it could place further restrictions on where U.S. government employees can travel within Israel.

The decision came after meetings and phone calls through the night Thursday into Friday, according to The New York Times, which reviewed a copy of an email that U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee sent to embassy workers.

The Times reported that the ambassador said in his email that the move was a result of “an abundance of caution” and that those wishing to leave “should do so TODAY.” He reportedly urged them to look for flights out of Ben Gurion Airport to any destination, cautioning that the embassy’s move “will likely result in high demand for airline seats today.”

In the email, Huckabee also said that there was “no need to panic,” but he underscored that those looking to leave should “make plans to depart sooner rather than later,” the Times reported.

“Focus on getting a seat to anyplace from which you can then continue travel to D.C., but the first priority will be getting expeditiously out of country,” Huckabee said in the email, according to the Times.

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The embassy reiterated the State Department’s advisory for U.S. citizens to reconsider traveling to Israel and the West Bank “due to terrorism and civil unrest.” Additionally, the department advised that U.S. citizens not travel to Gaza because of terrorism and armed conflict, as well as northern Israel, particularly within 2.5 miles of the Lebanese and Syrian borders because of “continued military presence and activity.” 

It also recommended that U.S. citizens not travel within 1.5 miles of the Egyptian border, with the exception of the Taba crossing, which remains open.

“Terrorist groups, lone-actor terrorists and other violent extremists continue plotting possible attacks in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Terrorists and violent extremists may attack with little or no warning, targeting tourist locations, transportation hubs, markets/shopping malls, and local government facilities,” the embassy said in its warning. “The security environment is complex and can change quickly, and violence can occur in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza without warning.”

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While the embassy did not specifically mention Iran in its warning, it referenced “increased regional tensions” that could “cause airlines to cancel and/or curtail flights into and out of Israel.”

Fox News Digital reached out to the State Department and the White House for comment on this matter.

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Pakistan has accused Afghanistan’s Taliban of serving as a “proxy” for India, amid escalating hostilities between Islamabad and Kabul.

Just hours after Pakistan bombed locations in Kabul early on Friday, Pakistan’s Minister of Defence Khawaja Asif wrote on X that after NATO forces withdrew from Afghanistan in July 2021, “it was expected that peace would prevail in Afghanistan and that the Taliban would focus on the interests of the Afghan people and regional stability”.

“However, the Taliban turned Afghanistan into a colony of India,” he wrote and accused the Taliban of “exporting terrorism”.

“Pakistan made every effort, both directly and through friendly countries, to keep the situation stable. It carried out extensive diplomacy. However, the Taliban became a proxy of India,” he alleged as he declared an “open war” with Afghanistan.

This is not the first time that Asif has brought India into tensions with Afghanistan.

Last October, he alleged: “India wants to engage in a low-intensity war with Pakistan. To achieve this, they are using Kabul.”

So far, Asif has presented no evidence to back his claims and the Taliban has rejected accusations that it is being influenced by India.

But India has condemned the Pakistani military’s recent actions in Afghanistan, adding to Islamabad’s growing discernment that its nuclear rival and the Taliban are edging closer.

Earlier this week, after the Pakistani military carried out air raids inside Afghanistan on Sunday, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement that New Delhi “strongly condemns Pakistan’s airstrikes on Afghan territory that have resulted in civilian casualties, including women and children, during the holy month of Ramadan”.

After Friday morning’s flare-up between Pakistan and Afghanistan, India’s foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal again said New Delhi “strongly” condemned Pakistan’s air strikes and also noted that they took place on a Friday during the holy month of Ramadan.

“It is another attempt by Pakistan to externalise its internal failures,” Jaiswal said in a statement on X.

Has India’s influence in Afghanistan grown under the Taliban and what is India’s endgame with Afghanistan?

Here’s what we know:

How have relations between India and the Taliban evolved?

When the Taliban first rose to power in Afghanistan in 1996, India adopted a hostile policy towards the group and did not recognise its assumption of power. India also shunned all diplomatic relations with the Taliban.

At the time, New Delhi viewed the Taliban as a proxy for Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Pakistan, together with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were the only three countries to have also recognised the Taliban administration at that point.

Then, in 2001, India supported the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, which toppled the Taliban administration. India then reopened its embassy in Kabul and embraced the new government led by Hamid Karzai. The Taliban, in response, attacked Indian embassies and consulates in Afghanistan. In 2008, at least 58 people were killed when the Taliban bombed India’s embassy in Kabul.

In 2021, after the Taliban returned to power, India closed its embassy in Afghanistan once again and also did not officially recognise the Taliban as the government of the country.

But a year later, as relations between Pakistan and the Taliban deteriorated over armed groups which Pakistan accuses Afghanistan of harbouring, India began engaging with the Taliban.

In 2022, India sent a team of “technical experts” to run its mission in Kabul and officially reopened its embassy in the Afghan capital last October. New Delhi also allowed the Taliban to operate Afghanistan consulates in the Indian cities of Mumbai and Hyderabad.

Over the past two years, officials from New Delhi and Afghanistan have also held meetings abroad, in Kabul and in New Delhi.

In January last year, the Taliban administration’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi met India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates.

Then, in October 2025, he visited New Delhi and met Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.

After this meeting, Muttaqi told journalists that Kabul “has always sought good relations with India” and, in a joint statement, Afghanistan and India pledged to have “close communication and continue regular engagement”.

Besides beefing up diplomatic ties, India has also offered humanitarian support to Afghanistan under the Taliban’s rule.

After a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck northern Afghanistan in November last year, India shipped food, medicine and vaccines, and Jaishankar was also among the first foreign ministers to call Muttaqi and offer his support. Since last December, India has also approved and implemented several healthcare infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, according to a December 2025 report by the country’s press information bureau.

Praveen Donthi, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera that the costs of avoiding engagement with the Taliban in the past have compelled the Indian government to adopt strategic pragmatism towards the Afghan leadership this time.

“New Delhi does not want to disregard this relationship on ideological grounds or create strategic space for India’s main strategic rivals, Pakistan and China, in its neighbourhood,” he said.

Raghav Sharma, professor and director at the Centre for Afghanistan Studies at the OP Jindal Global University in India, added that the current engagement also stems from New Delhi’s pragmatic realisation that the Taliban is now in charge in Afghanistan and that there is no meaningful opposition.

“States engage in order to protect and further their interests. While there is little by way of ideological convergence, there are areas of strategic convergence, which is what has pushed India to engage with the Taliban, some of their unpalatable policies notwithstanding,” he said.

Is this a new stance towards Afghanistan?

No. India’s growing influence and engagement with Afghanistan began well before the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.

Between December 2001 and September 2014, during the US presence in Afghanistan, New Delhi was a strong supporter of the Karzai government, and then of his successor, Ashraf Ghani’s government, which was in power from September 2014 until August 2021, when the US withdrew from the country.

In October 2011, under Karzai, India and Afghanistan renewed ties by signing an agreement to form a strategic partnership. New Delhi also pledged to support Afghanistan in the face of foreign troops in the nation as a part of this agreement.

Under both Karzai and his successor, Ghani, India invested more than $3bn in humanitarian aid and reconstruction work in Afghanistan. This included reconstruction projects like schools and hospitals, and also a new National Assembly building in Kabul, which was inaugurated in December 2015 when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Afghanistan for the first time.

India’s Border Road Organisation (BRO) also assisted Afghanistan in the development of infrastructure projects like the 218km Zaranj-Delaram highway in 2009 under Karzai’s government.

Under Ghani, New Delhi undertook building the Salma Dam project to help with irrigating Afghanistan. In June 2016, when Modi visited Afghanistan once again, he inaugurated this $290m dam project. In May 2016, Iran, India and Afghanistan also signed a trilateral trade and transit agreement on the Chabahar port.

During this period – 2001-2021 – Pakistan’s unease with New Delhi and Kabul’s new partnership grew.

In October 2011, after signing a strategic agreement with India, Karzai had assured Islamabad that while “India is a great friend, Pakistan is a twin brother”.

But Karzai was critical of Pakistan’s support for the Taliban. In his last speech as president of Afghanistan in Kabul in September 2014, he stated that he believed most of the Taliban leadership lived in Pakistan.

In a 2011 report by a Washington, DC-based think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Amer Latif, former director for South Asian affairs in the US Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, noted that Karzai was walking a “fine line between criticising Pakistan’s activities while also referring to Pakistan as Afghanistan’s ‘twin brother’.”

“It is in this context that Karzai appears to be looking to solidify long-term partnerships with countries that will aid his stabilisation efforts,” he said, referring to Karzai’s visit to India and his efforts to improve relations with the subcontinent.

When Ghani rose to power in September 2014, he tried to reset ties with Pakistan and also visited the country in November that year. But his efforts did not result in improved ties due to border disputes with Pakistan continuing until his administration was overthrown by the Taliban in August 2021.

So why has India maintained ties with Afghanistan under the Taliban?

Initially, when the Taliban returned to power in 2021 following the withdrawal of the US, political analysts largely expected Pakistan to lead the way in recognising the Taliban administration as the official government of Afghanistan, improving bilateral relations which had turned icy under Karzai and Ghani.

But relations turned hostile, with Pakistan repeatedly accusing the Taliban of allowing anti-Pakistan armed groups like the Pakistan Taliban (TTP) to operate from Afghan soil. The Taliban denies this.

Then, the deportation of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees by Pakistan in recent years further strained ties between the two neighbours.

India has ultimately taken a pragmatic approach to the Taliban in order to maintain the good relations it built with Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, and has somewhat leveraged poor relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan to cement these.

“With Pakistan’s increasingly strained relations with Afghanistan, the logic of ‘enemy’s enemy’ is acting as a glue between Kabul and New Delhi,” International Crisis Group’s Donthi said.

He added that despite the fact that India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government opposes Islamist organisations, “the strategic necessity to counter Pakistan has led it to engage with the Taliban proactively”.

India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed rivals which engaged in a four-day conflict in May 2025 after armed rebels killed Indian tourists in Pahalgam, a popular tourist spot in Indian-administered Kashmir, last April. New Delhi accused Pakistan of supporting rebel fighters, a charge Pakistan strongly denied.

For its part, Afghanistan took the opportunity to strongly condemn the Pahalgam attack and the Indian Ministry of External Affairs expressed “deep appreciation” to the Taliban for its “strong condemnation of the terrorist attack in Pahalgam … as well as for the sincere condolences”.

India has also condemned Pakistani military action in Afghanistan and has provided aid to thousands of Afghan refugees displaced from Pakistan.

So what is India’s endgame in Afghanistan?

Sharma, the OP Jindal Global University professor, said India wants to ensure that Pakistan and China, whose influence has grown in South Asia in recent years, “do not have a free run”, as “there is a divergence of interest on Afghanistan” with both Pakistan and its ally, China.

“There are security interests New Delhi is keen to further and protect for which engagement [with the Taliban] is the only option,” he added.

Anil Trigunayat, a former Indian diplomat, noted that while Afghanistan and Pakistan relations have their own dynamic, currently the Taliban leadership, even if not a monolith, refuses to play to the tunes of the Pakistan military and its intelligence agency.

“Hence they [Pakistan] accuse Indian complicity in Taliban actions in Pakistan,” he said.

But the Taliban, he said, “understands and appreciates India’s intent, policies and [humanitarian] contributions”, making its leaders keen to continue collaboration with New Delhi.

And just like that, Netflix has bowed out of its pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming and studio assets.

Late Thursday, the streaming colossus announced that it has decided against raising its $82.7 billion bid for a big chunk of the WBD properties, leaving Paramount Skydance with what amounts to the winning offer. Under Paramount’s latest revision to its original proposal, David Ellison’s media conglomerate will fork over some $111 billion for everything under the WBD tent, including the sports-heavy cable networks division.

Among the backers of Paramount’s $31 per share, all-cash bid are Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi and Apollo, which are providing a $57.5 billion debt commitment, and Ellison’s father/Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who has guaranteed a $45.7 billion equity commitment.

In a statement issued by co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, Netflix noted that Paramount’s latest escalation made any further attempt to claim the WBD assets a bad bit of business. “The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval,” Sarandos and Peters wrote. “However, we’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.”

Netflix went on to thank the WBD brass for “running a fair and rigorous process” before going on to characterize the assets as “a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.”

Meanwhile, as part of its sweetened offer, Paramount will foot the bill for the $2.8 billion termination fee WBD now owes Netflix.

Netflix’s announcement arrived just hours after Sarandos met with White House staffers to discuss his company’s bid for the WBD assets. President Donald Trump was not on hand for the meeting.

Paramount’s updated offer all but guarantees that it will walk away with the WBD spoils. While shareholders must vote to approve the deal, the amount of cash in play and the absence of a viable alternative suggest that the transaction will get the green flag.

Upon closing, the Paramount deal will bring CBS Sports and Turner Sports under one roof, thereby creating a massive rights portfolio that includes the NFL, NHL, Major League Baseball, college football, the Masters, the UFC and March Madness.

Uniting the rights to the marquee men’s college hoops tourney would effectively close the circle on the partnership forged in 2010 by former CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus and ex-Turner Sports president David Levy. After McManus determined that CBS could no longer afford to go it alone with its coverage of March Madness, the two execs hashed out a 14-year, $10.8 billion rights deal that would see the Turner networks share the burden—and the spoils—with CBS.

Ten years ago, the two partners extended the deal through 2032, tacking on another eight years of Madness for an additional $8.8 billion.

Having been subjected to a Beltway cross-examination and at least one disapproving social media salvo by the president, Netflix may have come to the conclusion that the regulatory fix was in. Earlier this month, Sarandos was grilled by a Senate committee in an antitrust hearing that often teetered on the edge of the profoundly unserious. In one heated exchange, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked why “so much of Netflix content for children promotes a transgender ideology?”

Hawley began his line of questioning by inquiring into relevant matters (labor concerns, theatrical windows), before veering into the culture war lane near the end of his allotted time. He concluded by expressing his concern that Sarandos and Netflix “don’t share my values or those of many other American parents,” a vibes-based assessment which the framers of the Sherman Act neglected to consider 136 years ago when they were going about the business of outlawing monopolistic practices.

Later in the hearing, Eric Schmitt, the junior senator from the Show Me State, told Sarandos that Netflix was responsible for creating the “wokest content in the history of the world.” Again, this was an antitrust hearing, not a meeting of a network standards and practices division.

Ellison turned down an invitation to testify at the hearing.

Netflix’s decision to bow out of the running was made shortly after the WBD board determined that Paramount’s latest bid was the “superior” offer. Paramount’s strategy to usurp Netflix as the front runner was reinforced by an aggressive campaign to assure WBD shareholders that it has a far better shot at successfully negotiating any potential regulatory hurdles.

Misgivings about Netflix’s chances were further amplified last weekend when President Donald Trump made a dig at a Netflix board member.

Trump on Saturday took to Truth Social to demand that Netflix bounce Susan Rice from its board of directors “IMMEDIATELY, or pay the consequences.” A former Obama and Biden administration official, Rice poked the bear during a podcast appearance in which she insinuated that “it is not going to end well” for corporations and news organizations that “bent the knee” to Trump.

When asked by the BBC about Trump’s anti-Rice salvo, Sarandos tried to shrug the whole thing off, saying of the president, “He likes to do a lot of things on social media.” Sarandos went on to assert that the executive branch has no say in the matter, and while that may be accurate from a legal standpoint, the Netflix co-CEO may want to take a gander at the big pile of nothing that used to be the East Wing of the White House. Stranger things (sorry) have happened.

“This is a business deal. It’s not a political deal,” Sarandos said. “This deal is run by the Department of Justice in the U.S. and regulators throughout Europe and around the world.”

The day after Sarandos brushed off Trump’s remarks, Paramount upped its offer to WBD to $31 a share, to be paid in all cash. This marked the 10th revision of Paramount’s original bid and included billions in additional financial incentives. Just hours after WBD acknowledged receipt of the beefed-up proposal, Ellison, the chairman and CEO of Paramount, attended the State of the Union Address as a guest of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

The Justice Department, which just two weeks ago dismissed Gail Slater, the head of its antitrust division, is said to be looking into Paramount’s proposal. Under federal law, antitrust enforcers are at liberty to scuttle any deal that poses a threat to fair and competitive business practices.

On Wednesday, House Democrats petitioned U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to provide a full accounting of why the DOJ ousted Slater, noting that her ejection has left a “leadership vacuum” at a time when “the antitrust division is handling historic cases.” Signed by Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, and Jerry Nadler, a Democratic congressman from New York, the letter stated that Slater’s departure leaves the DOJ bereft of “any principled antitrust experts left to guard the antitrust division from [a] cascade of corruption.”

Hand-picked by Trump to lead the antitrust division, Slater was confirmed by the Senate last March by a 78-19 vote.