Chinese leader Xi Jinping approached Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler last year about Beijing serving as a "bridge" between the kingdom and Iran, jump-starting talks that yielded last week's surprise rapprochement, a Saudi official said Wednesday.

The initial conversation between Xi and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took place during bilateral talks at a summit in Riyadh in December, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe how the deal -- whose ripple effects could spread across the Middle East -- took shape.

Thousands of Syrians demonstrated in the war-ravaged country's rebel-held northwest on Wednesday, marking 12 years since the start of pro-democracy protests and rejecting any international "normalisation" with Damascus.

The brutal repression of the 2011 protests, which began during the Middle East's Arab Spring uprisings, triggered a complex civil war that drew in foreign powers and jihadists.

It has claimed more than 500,000 lives and left millions displaced internally and abroad.

The German government is under pressure for hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was due to arrive in Berlin later Wednesday and facing strong criticism over planned legal reforms.

On the eve of Netanyahu's departure for Germany and ahead of a planned trip to Britain, 1,000 writers, artists and academics wrote to the two European nations' ambassadors urging their governments to scrap the visits.

The pain wells up inside Naki Bega as she remembers being herded onto a train to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi's most notorious extermination camp.

They "threw us into (cattle) wagons with a very small window, no water, no food. About 13 days later we arrived in Birkenau," said the 95-year-old, one of Greece's last Holocaust survivors.

The country marks the 80th anniversary of the first deportations of thousands of Greek Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau on Wednesday, a traumatic event that devastated a once-flourishing community whose roots go back to antiquity.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping approached Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler last year about Beijing serving as a "bridge" between the kingdom and Iran, jump-starting talks that yielded last week's surprise rapprochement, a Saudi official said Wednesday.

The initial conversation between Xi and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took place during bilateral talks at a summit in Riyadh in December, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe how the deal -- whose ripple effects could spread across the Middle East -- took shape.

Lebanon's under-fire central bank governor Riad Salameh failed to appear Wednesday before European investigators, with his legal team claiming the hearing would have been "in conflict with national sovereignty", a judicial source said.

Salameh, 72, is part of the Lebanese political class widely blamed for a crushing economic crisis that began in late 2019 and which the World Bank has dubbed one of the planet's worst in recent history.

The spokesman of Tunisia's Islamist-leaning Ennahdha party has been detained, his party said on Wednesday, denouncing the latest arrest of a prominent critic of President Kais Saied.

Abdelfattah Taghouti was detained by a national guard unit on Tuesday evening, Ennahdha said, demanding his immediate release.

More than 20 political figures have been arrested in the North African country in recent weeks, including members of the main opposition coalition, the National Salvation Front, and its main component, Ennahdha.

Thousands of sub-Saharan African students in Tunisia are still fearful after a surge of racist attacks following comments by President Kais Saied against illegal immigration, and are seeking concrete steps to protect them.

The violence erupted after Saied blamed "hordes of illegal migrants from sub-Saharan Africa" for most crime in Tunisia and alleged there was a "criminal plot" to change the nation's demographic make-up.

Eleven people were killed and more than 3,500 injured during celebrations for Iran's traditional fire festival ahead of the Persian New Year, state media reported Wednesday.

The fire festival, called Chaharshanbe Suri in Farsi, is celebrated every year on the night of the last Tuesday of the Iranian calendar year, which ends on March 20.

"Since February 20, 26 people have died in incidents related to Chaharchanbe Suri," including at least 11 on the day of the event along with more than 3,550 injured, emergency services chief Jafar Miadfar told state television.

Human Rights Watch accused the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday of arbitrarily detaining at least 2,400 Afghan asylum seekers in "miserable" accommodation for more than a year, pending resettlement elsewhere.

The rights group said that between 2,400 and 2,700 Afghans evacuated to the UAE following the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021 remain "arbitrarily detained" in makeshift refugee housing with limited freedom of movement and scarce access to legal counsel.