Trump triumph, Assad fall... define 2024

Donald Trump's US presidential election win, the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the Paris Olympics were among the news events that marked 2024.

AFP looks back at the major stories that made the headlines:

After the unprecedented attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Israel continued its offensive against the Palestinian armed group in Gaza, killing several of its chiefs, and extending its campaign into Lebanon.

In September Israel launched a huge air strike against Iran-backed Hamas ally Hezbollah, then a ground offensive in southern Lebanon against its strongholds.

In early October Iran then responded to the killings of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh -- in a strike on Tehran in July blamed on Israel -- and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, by launching 200 missiles at Israel. Israel riposted by hitting Iranian military sites.

After two months of open war, a fragile truce came into force on November 27 in Lebanon.

The war has killed at least 4,000 people in Lebanon since October 2023, according to the health ministry.

In Hamas-run Gaza, more than 45,000 people, a majority of them civilians, have been killed in the war unleashed, according to the health ministry there. The United Nations considers the figures reliable.

Gaza, where 62 people listed as alive are still held hostage, has been plunged into a humanitarian disaster.

In Syria, president Bashar al-Assad fled the country to Moscow after an 11-day lightning offensive launched on November 27 by Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

One of the emblematic moments of the fall of Damascus was the freeing of inmates from the infamous Sednaya prison.

That jail north of the capital was a symbol of the torture and executions under the 50-year rule of the Assad clan, especially since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011.

The country's Islamist-led government has sought to reassure minorities at home and governments abroad that they will protect all Syrians.

Since Assad's ousting Israel has conducted hundreds of strikes on Syria's military sites, wanting to prevent the country's weapons from falling into the hands of the interim government. It has also seized the UN-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights.

After a failed counteroffensive in 2023, following Russia's February 24, 2022 invasion, Ukraine in August launched a surprise incursion into Russia's Kursk region.

However, it has failed in its goal of diverting Moscow's forces from fighting in eastern Ukraine.