Thousands of Israelis protested for an 18th straight week against the hard-right government's controversial judicial reforms, despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shelving the overhaul more than a month ago.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in the central city of Rehovot, waving Israeli flags and blocking a major road junction.

Thousands gathered in Tel Aviv's Habima Square as they prepared to march across the city to Kaplan Street waving Israeli flags and chanting anti-Netanyahu slogans.

As Sudan's warring generals have repeatedly failed to honour multiple agreed ceasefires, experts warn of protracted fighting, despite both sides preparing to meet in Saudi Arabia for direct talks.

Army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his rival Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), were once allies but have for weeks been locked in deadly fighting to secure power.

The contest for Khartoum, the capital that is home to five million people, has descended into gruelling urban warfare with a high toll on civilian life.

Israeli troops killed two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, the Palestinian health ministry said, as the army claimed to have targeted the perpetrators of a "shooting attack".

"Two martyrs, shot by the occupation (Israeli forces) arrived at Thabet Thabet government hospital," in the city of Tulkarm, the health ministry said.

It named the two men as Hamza Khrewish and Samer al-Shafei, both 22, and said that one other person was wounded in the raid.

The UN's top aid official was in Saudi Arabia on Sunday for ceasefire talks between Sudan's warring generals, as concern grows for the humanitarian situation at the start of a fourth week of gun battles and air strikes in the Sudanese capital.

Multiple truce deals have been declared, without effect, since fighting erupted between army and paramilitary forces on April 15 in the poverty-stricken country with a history of political instability.

Iran executed on Saturday Swedish-Iranian dissident Habib Chaab for "terrorism", drawing prompt condemnation from Sweden, in the Islamic republic's latest use of the death penalty against dual nationals.

Chaab had been held in Iran since October 2020 after he vanished during a visit to Turkey before going on trial in Tehran, which does not recognise dual nationality.

Convicted of "corruption on earth" for heading a rebel group, he was condemned to death on December 6 -- a decision denounced by Sweden -- and Iran's supreme court upheld the sentence in March.

Iran executed on Saturday Swedish-Iranian dissident Habib Chaab for "terrorism", the judiciary said, in the Islamic republic's latest use of the death penalty against dual nationals.

Chaab had been held in Iran since October 2020 after he vanished during a visit to Turkey before going on trial in Tehran, which does not recognise dual nationality.

Convicted of "corruption on earth" for heading a rebel group, he was condemned to death on December 6 -- a decision denounced by Sweden -- and Iran's supreme court upheld the sentence in March.

The US and Saudi governments confirmed direct talks between the warring Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces would start in Jeddah on Saturday, even as fighting showed little signs of abating in the Sudanese capital.

A joint US-Saudi statement welcomed the "start of pre-negotiation talks" and urged sustained global support to quell fighting.

Lionel Messi on Friday apologised for going on an unauthorised trip to Saudi Arabia that led to Argentina's World Cup-winning captain being suspended by his club Paris Saint-Germain.

"I want to apologise obviously to my teammates and to the club," Messi said in a video posted on Instagram to his 458 million followers.

He was suspended by the Qatar-owned club after failing to turn up for training on Monday, a day after their 3-1 home defeat by Lorient in Ligue 1.

The Covid-19 pandemic, which killed millions of people and wreaked economic and social havoc, no longer constitutes a global health emergency, the WHO said Friday, warning that the threat remained.

It is "with great hope that I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency", World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.

The extreme heat that engulfed the Iberian peninsula and parts of North Africa last week would have been "almost impossible without climate change", an international scientific study found on Friday.

The "exceptional early heatwave" involved "local temperatures up to 20 degrees hotter than normal and April records being broken by up to 6 degrees", said the report by the World Weather Attribution (WWA), whose scientists study the link between extreme weather events and climate change.