Finally home in Turkey, Mehmet Erturk cannot eat the bread his wife has made him. After 20 years jailed in Syria, half his teeth are missing and the other half are threatening to fall out.

"It was torture after torture," he told AFP, miming the truncheon blows to the mouth the guards would give him at a notorious Damascus prison known as the Palestine Branch, where he spent part of his time incarcerated.

This time he was there by choice. Mohammed Darwish was back in a jail that was run by Syria's feared intelligence services -- and Bashar al-Assad was no longer president.

Cell number nine reeks of putrefaction. It is an underground windowless room with blackened dripping walls where the 34-year-old journalist was held with around 100 others.

Darwish was detained for months by one of the most feared branches of the former government's many-tentacled intelligence services.

Thousands of Israelis demonstrated Saturday for a deal to release the remaining hostages still held in Gaza after more than 14 months of war against Hamas in the Palestinian territory.

"We all can agree that we have failed until now and that we can reach an agreement now," Lior Ashkenazi, a prominent Israeli actor, told a crowd gathered in the commercial hub of Tel Aviv.

Itzik Horn, whose sons Eitan and Iair are still being held captive in Gaza, said: "End the war, the time has arrived for action and the time has arrived to bring everyone home."

The Syrian military intelligence officers who detained Ghazi Mohammed al-Mohammed told him to forget his name and who he was.

They took away his papers, he said, and told him: "Now you're number 3006."

For five and a half months Mohammed languished in one of president Bashar al-Assad's jails, losing 40 kilograms (88 pounds), all the while under the threat of imminent execution.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati called Saturday for Syrians who sought refuge in his country to return home following the fall of Syria's longtime leader, Bashar al-Assad.

"The consequences of the Syrian war made Lebanon home to the largest number of refugees per capita, with one-third of our population comprising of Syrian refugees", Mikati said at a Rome political festival.

"The strain on our resources has been substantial, worsening existing economic trouble and creating fierce competition for jobs and services," he said in English.

Gaza's civil defence agency said Israeli strikes on the territory killed 17 people on Saturday, including seven at a UN school housing displaced people that the Israeli military said was used as a Hamas command centre.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP there were seven people killed, including women and children, and at least 10 wounded "when Israeli warplanes targeted the Al-Majida Wasila school west of Gaza City".

The United States has made "direct contact" with Syria's victorious Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebels despite designating the group as terrorists, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Saturday, as he sought international unity on a peaceful transition.

"We've been in contact with HTS and with other parties," Blinken told reporters after talks on Syria in the Jordanian Red Sea resort of Aqaba.

He did not give details on how the contact took place but when asked if the United States reached out directly, he said: "Direct contact -- yes."

The citizens of Damascus largely celebrated the fall of Bashar al-Assad's hated regime with joy, after 13 long years of brutal civil war.

But the city's drinking holes did have one concern.

The rebel army that overthrew the former leader was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist group which some drinkers feared would forbid the sale of alcohol.

For four days after the HTS fighters entered the city, pubs and liquor stores remained shut but no crackdown emerged and now venues are tentatively reopening.

Negotiators failed to produce an agreement on how to respond to drought at Saudi-hosted UN talks, participants said on Saturday, falling short of a hoped-for binding protocol addressing the scourge.

The 12-day meeting of parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), known as COP16, concluded early on Saturday morning, a day later than scheduled as parties tried to finalise a deal.

Hours before rebel forces seized Damascus and toppled his government on Sunday, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was already out of the country, telling hardly anyone, five former officials told AFP.

The night before, Assad had even asked his close adviser Buthaina Shaaban to prepare a speech -- which the ousted leader never gave -- before flying from Damascus airport to Russia's Hmeimim air base in Syria, and from there out of the country.

Assad left even "without telling... his close confidants in advance", a former aide told AFP, requesting anonymity for security reasons.