Oil firm Saudi Aramco on Monday announced profits of $30.08 billion for the second quarter, a sharp fall from the same period last year when prices surged after Russia invaded Ukraine.

The 38-percent year-on-year decline "mainly reflected the impact of lower crude oil prices and weakening refining and chemicals margins", the largely state-owned company said in a statement published on the Saudi stock exchange.

The decline followed a drop of 19.25 percent in first-quarter net profit.

Iran's foreign minister visited Japan on Monday for the first time since 2019, in a rare trip to a G7 member country by the Islamic republic's top diplomat.

The purpose of the visit by Hossein Amir-Abdollahian to the current chair of the G7 was not announced, but reports said Japan would press Iran to stop supplying Russia with arms.

Kyiv's military said last month it had destroyed dozens of Iran-built attack drones targeted at Ukraine's Odesa region.

Iraqi villager Omar Ziad gazes at the cracked and barren earth where his fish farm once stood, lost to water conservation efforts during a devastating four-year drought.

As the alarming water crisis blamed mostly on climate change drags on, officials see the need for trade-offs in an effort to meet the country's demands.

Drastic government measures have restricted water use for some purposes, including crop irrigation, and authorities have cracked down on illegal practices they long ignored.

Since late May, unauthorised fish farms like Ziad's have become a target.

Two years ago, Dubai's skyscraper-studded skyline welcomed a Ferris wheel touted as the world's largest, but it mysteriously stopped turning just months after opening.

The much-touted Ain Dubai (Dubai Eye) was designed as a tourist-luring landmark in the United Arab Emirates' glam-hub, which is home to the world's tallest building.

But now it stands idle for undisclosed reasons, its extravagant light fixtures the only parts seemingly still working.

"Ain Dubai remains closed until further notice," says an official website for the attraction.

Israeli forces on Sunday killed three Palestinian militants in the West Bank, the army said, the latest deaths in a surge of violence rocking the occupied territory.

An army statement said its forces "operated to prevent an immediate threat" and described one of the dead as a "leading military operative" from the Jenin refugee camp, a militant stronghold in the northern West Bank.

A minibus plunged into a ravine in Morocco on Sunday, killing all 24 people on board in one of the North African country's worst-ever road accidents, officials said.

The passengers were travelling a mountainous route to a weekly market in the town of Demnate, in the central province of Azilal, when the minibus overturned on a bend, the local authorities said.

Images on public broadcaster 2M showed the vehicle crushed at the bottom of the ravine.

At least 30 migrants are missing following two shipwrecks off the Italian island of Lampedusa, according to survivor testimony, as rescuers on Sunday winched to safety 34 others stranded on the rocks by rough seas.

Around 28 people were reported lost at sea by survivors on one boat, while three were reported missing from the second, after both went down in stormy weather on Saturday, said the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Both were rickety iron boats believed to have set off from Sfax in Tunisia on Thursday.

Thousands of Israelis demonstrated on Saturday in Tel Aviv and other cities against the hard-right government's judicial overhaul opponents see as a threat to democracy.

The reform package has split the nation and triggered one of the biggest protest movements in Israel's history since being unveiled in January by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition, which includes extreme-right and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties.

Demonstrators have kept up pressure on the Netanyahu government with weekly protests across the country.

A Palestinian gunman killed an Israeli municipal officer in commercial hub Tel Aviv on Saturday, before being fatally shot by another officer, authorities said.

The attack came amid a surge in violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a day after a 19-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.

Tel Aviv police said a gunman opened fire at a municipal inspector in the city centre, who according to the Magen David Adom emergency service was taken to hospital "in critical condition" and later pronounced dead.

A former aide of a lawmaker from Israel's hard-right governing coalition was among two settlers arrested Saturday over the killing of a 19-year-old Palestinian in the occupied West Bank, Israeli media reported.

Qusai Jamal Maatan was shot dead in Burqah, east of Ramallah, on Friday as armed settlers clashed with villagers.

The UN has warned of a dramatic spike in such cases since the most right-wing government in Israel's history took power at the end of last year.