The group Doctors Without Borders called Sunday for the "urgent scaling up" of earthquake aid to northwest Syria as it delivered a convoy laden with emergency assistance.

Aid has been slow to reach Syria's rebel-held areas since the February 6 quake killed a combined total of more than 44,000 people across Turkey and Syria.

"An urgent increase in the volume of supplies is needed to match the scale of the humanitarian crisis," said the French aid group Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

It charged that supplies "currently fail to even match pre-earthquake volumes".

The Berlin film festival, long a champion of Iran's embattled independent directors, is spotlighting its citizens' fight for basic rights with a series of screenings, events and a red-carpet protest.

French-Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani, who is serving on the jury for the top prizes with president Kristen Stewart, said as the festival kicked off Thursday that cinema was a crucial fuel for the freedom movement.

"In a country like Iran that is a dictatorship, art is not only an intellectual or philosophical thing, it's essential, it's like oxygen," she said.

For most of their lives, children from historic Cairo's Al-Khalifa district only saw the mausoleums, mosques and madrasa schools that pepper their neighbourhood from outside heavy bronze doors.

In one of the world's oldest Islamic cities, communities were becoming increasingly separated from the centuries-old buildings they lived alongside -- prompting architect and heritage management expert May al-Ibrashy to launch a programme to "foster a sense of ownership over this heritage".

Badr Al-Sharari refused to let his disability curb his passion, and despite being blind, the Saudi rider has now trailblazed his way to official recognition in horse-mad Saudi Arabia.

The 35-year-old had to train at least three times a week for nearly two years before finally being admitted this month into the Saudi Arabian Equestrian Federation as its first blind member.

But the data sector worker told AFP that just as important as his journey into the official ranks was the parallel one to self-empowerment.

An Israeli air strike killed early Sunday 15 people including two Syrian civilians and badly damaged a building in a Damascus district housing state security agencies, a war monitor said.

The strike targeted a meeting that included Syrian regime officers and was "the deadliest Israeli attack in the Syrian capital" since the civil war began, said Rami Abdel Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke Saturday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and separately with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, reaffirming US support for a "two-state solution" in the region and asking the two to "restore calm."

Blinken spoke by telephone with both men to reaffirm US commitment to "a negotiated two-state solution and opposition to policies that endanger its viability," State Department spokesman Ned Price said.

Tens of thousands of Israelis rallied Saturday nationwide for the seventh straight week, days before parliament is due to vote on controversial legal reforms advanced by the government.

The proposed overhaul being pushed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government would allow parliament to overrule Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority and boost politicians' power over judicial appointment.

A crowd marched through central Tel Aviv, with many of them waving Israeli flags and chanting "democracy", an AFP correspondent said.

Rifts already exist within the Iranian regime and they will become more apparent, eventually contributing to cutting down Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's power, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah of Iran, said Saturday.

"The full control of Khamenei makes it almost impossible for those who are closely associated with him to take position against him," said Pahlavi, who is one of several forces opposing the Iranian regime.

The small, grey house in southern Turkey that once looked out onto the road might appear untouched by last week's huge earthquake but it is now one floor lower.

Surrounding the building in Demirkopru village, home to 1,000 people, are bits of debris floating in murky water, broken pavements and lopsided houses.

The February 6 earthquake and its aftershocks that ravaged swathes of Turkey and Syria and killed more than 44,000 people has split Demirkopru in two.

The private network Iran International TV said Saturday that it had been forced on UK police advice to shut down its London studios, blaming a surge in threats from the protest-hit regime in Iran.

The station has been giving extensive coverage to anti-regime demonstrations that erupted in Iran five months ago, and says two of its senior journalists received death threats in response to their reporting.