Syria's new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa held talks Monday with senior Arab diplomats expressing support for the Syrian people and discussing future cooperation, in the latest high-profile visits since Bashar al-Assad's overthrow.

Sharaa, whose Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) spearheaded the offensive that toppled Assad on December 8, has welcomed envoys from the Middle East and beyond in recent days, including Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on Sunday.

Two Syrian doctors and a nurse told AFP in a series of interviews over the weekend that Bashar al-Assad's government coerced them into providing false testimony to international investigators after a deadly 2018 chlorine attack.

The three, who treated the wounded at a field hospital in the rebel-held town of Douma near Damascus after the April 7, 2018 attack, said they were summoned to national security headquarters.

Exhausted by more than 14 months of war, the wives and mothers of Israeli soldiers are uniting in protest against exemptions from conscription for ultra-Orthodox men.

For several Saturday evenings, the bridge over a key highway that runs between Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv, and Givat Shmuel, a bastion of religious Zionists whose sons and husbands proudly serve in the army, has been the scene of a tense standoff.

Just 12 trucks distributed food and water in northern Gaza in two-and-a-half months, aid group Oxfam said on Sunday, raising the alarm over the worsening humanitarian situation in the besieged Palestinian territory.

The Israeli authorities rejected the report, saying it was "deliberately and inaccurately" ignoring their humanitarian efforts.

Italy's Euro 2020 winning coach Roberto Mancini admitted Sunday that he had regrets over leaving the Italian national team to take control of Saudi Arabia.

Mancini left the Azzurri in August 2023 to take over as coach of the Saudis, but was fired from his role in October following a run of poor results during his 14-month stint in charge.

"If I could go back, I wouldn't take the decision to leave the Nazionale (Italian national team) again, because coaching this national team is the most beautiful thing," Mancini told public broadcaster Rai.

The visiting head of a UN investigative body for Syria said Sunday it was possible to find "more than enough" evidence to convict people of crimes against international law, but there was an immediate need to secure and preserve it.

The doors of Syria's prisons were flung open after an Islamist-led rebel alliance ousted longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad this month, more than 13 years after his brutal repression of anti-government protests triggered a war that would kill more than 500,000 people.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday vowed to retaliate against Yemen's Huthi rebels after they fired a missile at Tel Aviv, warning that Israel would target what he described as the last remaining arm of "Iran's axis of evil".

The Huthis struck Israel's commercial hub on Saturday with what they claimed was a ballistic missile, injuring 16 people and forcing many to leave their homes following the pre-dawn attack.

Two weeks after seizing power in a sweeping offensive, Syria's new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa on Sunday said weapons in the country, including those held by Kurdish-led forces, would come under state control.

Sharaa spoke alongside Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, after earlier meeting with Lebanese Druze leaders and vowing to end "negative interference" in the neighbouring country.

Pope Francis doubled down Sunday on his condemnation of Israel's strikes on the Gaza Strip, denouncing their "cruelty" for the second time in as many days despite Israel accusing him of "double standards".

"And with pain I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children being machine-gunned, of the bombings of schools and hospitals. What cruelty," the pope said after his weekly Angelus prayer.

It comes a day after the 88-year-old Argentine lamented an Israeli airstrike that killed seven children from one family on Friday, according to Gaza's rescue agency.

Iran's supreme leader denied Sunday that militant groups around the region functioned as Tehran's proxies, warning that if his country chose to "take action", it would not need them anyway.

The remarks came after a year in which Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza suffered heavy losses in wars with Israel, and two weeks after the fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who had been a key link in Tehran's so-called axis of resistance.