Malls and shopping centres in Iran's capital will limit opening hours starting Tuesday, closing two hours earlier to tackle severe energy shortages, local media said.

The fuel crisis has already led to frequent power cuts in Tehran in recent weeks and nationwide closures of schools and businesses.

The Tehran Chamber of Trade Unions and Guilds has decided that malls and shopping centres would close at 8:00 pm (1630 GMT), instead of their usual time of 10:00 pm, according to a statement carried by news agency ISNA.

The war in the Palestinian territories is having a catastrophic impact on the local economy, the World Bank said Monday, noting that all sectors have been badly affected by Israel's attacks.

Economic output in the Gaza Strip plummeted by 86 percent in the first half of this year, and by 23 percent in the West Bank, according to recent Bank data, leaving the Palestinian economy on track to contract by 26 percent in inflation-adjusted terms this year.

President-elect Donald Trump characterized the rebel ouster of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad as an "unfriendly takeover" by US ally Turkey as he addressed the conflict at a news conference on Monday.

"I think Turkey is very smart... Turkey did an unfriendly takeover, without a lot of lives being lost. I can say that Assad was a butcher, what he did to children," Trump told reporters at his residence in Florida.

Western powers are looking to establish contact with Syria's new rulers, aiming to avoid Iraq- or Libya-style chaos after the fall of the Assad regime to Islamist-led rebels.

Europe's top diplomat Kaja Kallas was heading to Damascus on Monday, after a number of countries, including the United States, announced they had made initial approaches.

The situation in Syria, long allied with Iran and Russia, remains volatile and Western nations are wary of the Al-Qaeda roots of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that seized power in a lightning offensive.

The UN has presented a plan to Libya to help it organize elections, unify competing governments and overhaul its institutions, the UN envoy to the troubled country told the Security Council Monday.

The vast North African nation of 6.8 million people has struggled to recover from years of conflict after the 2011 NATO-backed uprising that overthrew longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

Libya remains divided between a UN-recognized government based in the capital Tripoli and a rival administration in the east, backed by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.

When Syria's new government put out a call on social media for soldiers and police to lay down their arms and register with the authorities, Kamal Merhej was happy to oblige.

"I don't like the army, I want to get back on track with my life without anyone to give me orders," the 28-year-old told AFP.

He spent nine years in the army, posted to the capital Damascus, and said he was now happy to be back in his home city of Latakia on the Mediterranean coast.

A Syrian bunker complex outside the port of Tartus was ablaze and rocked by explosions Monday just hours after what a war monitor and locals said was an intense wave of Israeli air strikes.

Even after the strikes ended, blasts continued to erupt in a valley outside the village of Bmalkah, a Christian community in the hills behind the city, which is home to Russia's naval base in Syria.

Israeli planes launched "the heaviest strikes in Syria's coastal region since the start of strikes in 2012" overnight, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Libyans watched the fall of Syria's Bashar al-Assad with a mixture of apprehension and hope, wishing "their brothers" in the Levant a better outcome than their own.

Ten years after the downfall and death of Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, the North African country remains plagued by division and instability.

"It's now been 14 years since the people of Syria have been waiting for their turn to come," said 47-year-old history and geography teacher Al-Mahdiya Rajab.

Israeli strikes targeted military sites in Syria's coastal Tartus region overnight, a war monitor said Monday, calling them "the heaviest strikes" there in years.

"Israeli warplanes launched strikes" targeting a series of sites including air defence units and "surface-to-surface missile depots", the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

It said 18 raids "targeted strategic locations on the Syrian coast", added the Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of sources inside the country.

In the Assad clan's former heartland of Latakia, many in the toppled president's Alawite minority are relieved that his iron-clad rule has come to an end.

But they fear marginalisation -- and even worse, reprisals -- from the Islamist-led rebels who overthrew him.

The alliance spearheaded by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which seized Damascus and ousted Bashar al-Assad on December 8 after a lightning offensive, has sought to reassure minority communities in the Sunni Muslim majority country.