Israel's top court denied on Sunday a petition by a pro-settlement organisation to force authorities to demolish a Bedouin village in the occupied West Bank, capping years of legal battles.

The Khan al-Ahmar community, on a strategic highway east of Jerusalem, was slated for demolition in 2018 after a ruling that it was built without Israeli permits.

Right-wing Israeli group Regavim had taken the government to court in order to force officials to raze the village, whose 200 residents have drawn international support.

Israeli forces on Sunday demolished a Palestinian primary school in the occupied West Bank, citing safety issues and drawing sharp criticism from the European Union which had funded the project.

Palestinians hurled rocks at Israeli forces who fired tear gas at them as bulldozers moved in on the site at Jabbet al-Dhib village near Bethlehem.

The EU said it was "appalled" after Israeli forces arrived at dawn at the school site, which a Palestinian Authority official said served 45 students and consisted of five classrooms.

The Arab League on Sunday welcomed back Syria's government, ending a more than decade-long suspension and securing President Bashar al-Assad's return to the Arab fold after years of isolation.

In November 2011, the body suspended Damascus over its crackdown on peaceful protests, which had begun earlier that year and which spiralled into a war that has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country's infrastructure and industry.

When a maternity hospital in the Sudanese capital came under bombardment, Esraa Hesbalrasoul snatched her premature twins from an incubator and rushed out in a panic.

In the chaos, only one of the infants survived.

Hesbalrasoul now tends to her baby in a small hospital in the capital's twin city of Omdurman that for weeks has struggled to weather the near-ceaseless fighting.

Numerous medical facilities have been shelled in the fighting that broke out on April 15 between rival generals and the forces they command.

An Iraqi court on Sunday sentenced to death a former policeman convicted of killing prominent academic Hisham al-Hashemi, whose murder in 2020 sparked condemnation in Iraq and abroad.

The sentence against Ahmed Hamdawi Oueid for killing Hashemi, an expert on Sunni extremism and a government security adviser, was handed down by a Baghdad criminal court and can be appealed, the judiciary said.

A well-respected academic and expert on jihadist groups, Hashemi was shot dead outside his Baghdad home in July 2020 by gunmen on motorcycles.

Exhausted by crackdowns in Turkey's Kurdish heartland, Ali is backing the main rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in elections next Sunday -- though his faith in the presidential hopeful is not great.

"It's time for a change," the 50-year-old told AFP in Diyarbakir, the Kurds' unofficial capital in southeast Turkey.

"For anyone watching TV in Turkey, Kurds are terrorists," said Ali, who declined to give his full name for fear of retribution.

Turkey's multi-faceted opposition alliance wants to undo President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's two-decade legacy of highly centralised and religiously conservative rule.

Here is a look at its plan of action should it win next Sunday's parliamentary and presidential vote.

- End 'one-man regime' -

Opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu has portrayed his six-party alliance, which includes liberals, nationalists and religious conservatives, as a force for democratic change.

Abhorred and adored, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been compared to sultans and pharaohs while stamping his outsized personality and domineering style on Turkey over 20 years.

Elected as prime minister and then as an uber-powerful president under a tailor-made constitution, Erdogan has become Turkey's most important and polarising leader in generations.

A builder, a political brawler and a campaign beast, here are five of Erdogan's most emblematic traits:

- Builder -

At Lebanon's national music conservatory, pianos collect dust and classrooms sit empty, making the institution another casualty of an economic collapse that has crippled the public sector and hampered education.

Toufic Kerbage, 65, watched the value of his pay packet and pension evaporate after the Lebanese economy began melting down in 2019, taking the local currency and people's savings with it.

Without family support "I would have starved," said the music teacher, who began working at the conservatory in the late 1980s.

Seeking a path out of the Gaza Strip's grinding poverty, Islam Abu Taima combs market alleyways for scraps of cardboard, hoping to transform the castoffs into sellable toys.

Poverty in the conflict-wracked Palestinian territory, a thin strip of land wedged between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, has hit a rate of 53 percent, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.