Hundreds of employees of Israel's public broadcaster protested Wednesday in Tel Aviv against a minister's threat to cut funding to its radio and television services, an AFP correspondent said.

"We are all KAN," read placards at the demonstration, referring to the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (KAN), as employees were joined at a Tel Aviv theatre by Lior Raz, star of the hit Israeli Netflix series "Fauda".

Israel's new Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi warned earlier this month of potentially hefty budget cuts to KAN.

A hugely controversial display panel outside Paris on private land commemorating the stay of Iran's late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in France has been badly damaged, police said Wednesday.

The glass-fronted panel is in the village of Neauphle-le-Chateau west of Paris, where Khomeini stayed for several months in exile before returning in triumph to Iran to found the Islamic republic.

The judge leading the investigation into Beirut's deadly 2020 port blast refused Wednesday to step down from the probe, rejecting charges brought against him by Lebanon's top prosecutor in the politically charged case.

Investigative judge Tarek Bitar defied Lebanon's entrenched ruling elite this week by daring to charge several powerful figures -- including prosecutor general Ghassan Oueidat -- over the blast and reviving a probe that was suspended for over a year amid vehement political and legal pushback.

The United Nations on Wednesday inscribed an ancient city and its dam in war-torn Yemen and a futurist park in cash-strapped Lebanon on its world heritage list.

The UN cultural agency listed both as world heritage sites in danger, the first because of the conflict raging in Yemen since 2014, and the second because of "its alarming state of conservation" and the lack of resources in Lebanon to maintain it.

Israeli forces shot dead two Palestinians in separate incidents Wednesday, including one who allegedly tried to stab soldiers and a teenager who appeared to point a fake gun at police, sources on both sides said.

In the first incident, Arref Abdel Nasser Arref Lahlouh, 22, was killed "by Israeli gunfire," near the occupied West Bank Palestinian city of Qalqilya, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

The army said that Lahlou "attempted to carry out a stabbing attack" near the Jewish settlement of Kdumim.

Lebanese protesters on Wednesday blocked roads and burnt tires near the central bank in Beirut as the weakened local currency plummeted to a new low against the dollar.

Since 2019, Lebanon has been in the throes of an economic crisis dubbed by the World Bank as one of the worst in recent global history, pushing much of the population into poverty.

Alaa Kharchib of the Depositors' Outcry Association that had organised the demonstration warned of an impending "social explosion".

"No one trusts our corrupt officials or the central bank governor," Kharchib told AFP.

Israeli archaeologists said Wednesday that they are trying to uncover the meaning of a recently discovered hand imprint carved into the stone wall of an ancient moat outside Jerusalem's Old City.

The imprint, which may been made as a "prank", was found in a thousand-year-old moat exposed during works to expand a road in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem near Herod's Gate, the Israeli Antiquities Authority said.

The sewing machines and fabric that surround Alaa Adel at her "Iraqcouture" studio in Baghdad are testament to her success in deeply patriarchal Iraq.

Adel, 33, counts herself among a limited number of female entrepreneurs in a country where most women don't work outside the home.

"We have a social tradition that prevents many women from working," Adel said at her studio in Baghdad's Karrada commercial district.

Even for those who do, "it is not always that easy," she added.

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in a book released Tuesday staunchly defended Saudi Arabia after the killing of a dissident writer, gloating that his diplomatic relationship with the kingdom was a "middle finger" to US media.

Pompeo flew to Riyadh days after the October 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi living in the United States who wrote opinion pieces in The Washington Post criticizing the kingdom's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Egyptian archaeologists said Tuesday they had discovered an 1,800-year-old "complete residential city from the Roman-era" in the heart of the southern city of Luxor.

The city, dating to the second and third centuries, is the "oldest and most important city found on the eastern bank of Luxor," according to Mostafa Waziri, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Archaeologists discovered "a number of residential buildings", as well as "two pigeon towers" -- a structure used to house pigeons or doves -- and a "number of metal workshops," Waziri said in a statement.