Two Iran-affiliated fighters have been killed in the latest Israeli air strike on targets in Syria, a war monitor said Sunday, with state news agency SANA reporting five Syrian soldiers wounded.
The strike early Sunday near the western Syrian city of Homs was Israel's third since early Thursday, after the capital Damascus was targeted that morning and early Friday.
A suspected assailant was killed by Israeli soldiers after a West Bank car ramming Saturday, the army said, in an escalation that threatens to end a relative lull during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan so far.
The Palestinian's death came less than 24 hours after an Arab Israeli allegedly snatched a gun from a police officer at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound and fired it before being shot dead.
Thousands of Israelis protested in Tel Aviv Saturday for a 13th straight week against a controversial judicial overhaul now frozen by the government while talks are held with party representatives.
Carrying Israeli flags, people marched through the centre of Israel's commercial hub, chanting "democracy" and carrying placards condemning the hard-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Smaller rallies were taking place in other cities.
Iraq inaugurated an oil refinery in the central city of Karbala on Saturday, a project the government hopes will reduce its dependency on imports.
Oil Minister Hayan Abdel Ghani announced the refinery had begun "commercial production" after a ribbon-cutting ceremony led by Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani.
It has the capacity to refine 140,000 barrels per day and "help meet local demand for petrol, kerosene and heating oil, while reducing imports", Abdel Ghani said.
Despite its immense oil and gas reserves, Iraq remains dependent on imports to meet energy needs.
Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry met with his Syrian counterpart Faisal Mekdad in Cairo on Saturday, a first since Syria's civil war broke out over a decade ago, Shoukry's office said.
The meeting comes amid amplified Arab engagement with the Damascus government which has been politically isolated in the region since the start of the Syria war and was expelled from the Cairo-based Arab League in 2011 over its bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations.
Israeli police on Saturday shot dead an Arab man who they said grabbed a gun from an officer and fired it in a scuffle at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
The dead man was identified as 26-year-old medical student Mohammed al-Asibi, a resident of the Bedouin village of Hura, in southern Israel.
Asibi's family has disputed the police account of his death and demanded to see CCTV footage, local media said, with police saying there was none.
A sandstorm enveloped central Iraq, including Baghdad, on Friday, the first such weather event to hit the arid country this year.
In 2022, Iraq experienced more than a dozen sandstorms, an unprecedented number that was attributed to desertification.
Iraqis who ventured outside on Friday afternoon were greeted with the increasingly familiar ochre sky and unbreathable air typical of sandstorms, with AFP journalists reporting greatly reduced visibility and a film of dust covering cars and houses.
Thousands of Muslims packed Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound on the second Friday of Ramadan, for peaceful prayers that saw no clashes with the Israeli security forces, an AFP journalist reported.
The Jordanian body which administers the mosque compound in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem said that 250,000 people prayed at Islam's third holiest site, built on what Jews call the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site.
An exiled Turkish dissident scholar went on trial in absentia in Istanbul on Friday over a deadly 1998 explosion, a charge she has been cleared of four times.
Pinar Selek, 51, is best known for her ground-breaking research on the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and her work with street children.
An avowed feminist and prolific author, Selek was first arrested in 1998 while studying Turkey's Kurdish community, which has faced decades of persecution.
The devastating earthquake that hit southern Turkey and neighbouring Syria in February damaged more than 20 percent of Turkey's agricultural production, the UN's food agency said Friday.
The 7.8-magnitude quake on February 6, and its aftershocks, killed more than 55,000 people and left many more in dire conditions.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said initial assessments in Turkey revealed "severe damage to agriculture, including crops, livestock, fisheries and aquaculture, as well as rural infrastructure in affected areas".
