The WHO reiterated Wednesday the need for China to share more data on its explosive Covid outbreak, while praising Washington's "radical transparency" in its efforts to battle a new sub-variant.

The World Health Organization has repeatedly voiced concern that China's official statistics are not showing the true impact of its current surge in Covid cases.

"WHO still believes that deaths are heavily underreported from China," its emergencies director Michael Ryan told reporters.

A civilian shot dead a Palestinian who had knifed an Israeli near a settlement in the occupied West Bank, the army and emergency services said, the second of two deadly incidents on Wednesday.

The inauguration in late December of the most right-wing government in Israel's history, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, has sparked fears of a military escalation in the West Bank which Israel has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War.

Turkey's ambassador to Israel, Sakir Ozkan Torunlar, presented his credentials to President Isaac Herzog on Wednesday, the latest move in rebuilding ties after years of crisis between the two countries.

Relations were frozen in 2010 after a deadly Israeli raid on the Turkish Mavi Marmara ship, part of a flotilla carrying humanitarian aid that was trying to breach a blockade on the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

The Egyptian pound traded Wednesday at half its value from March after the central bank intervened for a third time as part of an International Monetary Fund loan agreement.

The devaluation, representing a drop of around 50 percent against the dollar over the 10-month period, comes as the price of imported food and other goods soars in the Arab world's most populous country.

The currency plunged to 31.95 pounds to the dollar in state banks on Wednesday, before settling at 29.7 in the afternoon, according to the central bank.

Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, jailed half a year ago over protests related to a building collapse, has been released for two weeks because of health concerns, his lawyer said Wednesday.

Rasoulof, 50, was arrested on July 8 after being accused of encouraging demonstrations that erupted after the deadly collapse of a building in May in the southwestern city of Abadan.

A former Iranian prison official sentenced to life in Sweden for crimes committed during a 1988 purge of dissidents appeared in court again Wednesday as his appeal trial opened.

The case relates to the killing of at least 5,000 prisoners across Iran, allegedly ordered by supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini, to avenge attacks carried out by exiled opposition group the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) at the end of the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88.

Hamid Noury, 61, was convicted of a "serious crime against international law" and "murder" in July 2022 by a Stockholm district court.

A Turkish court on Wednesday released an internationally respected medic who outraged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by backing a probe into the army's alleged use of chemical weapons in Iraq.

Turkish Medical Association head Sebnem Korur Fincanci was detained and jailed in October for using a television interview to highlight claims that first surfaced in media close to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The militia alleged that 17 of its fighters had died in Turkish chemical weapons attacks in the mountains of northern Iraq that month.

The spiritual leader of the largest ultra-Orthodox Jewish party within Israel's ruling coalition, Rabbi Shimon Baadani, died Wednesday at the age of 94, his Shas party announced.

Ultra-Orthodox parties were key to right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's securing a 61-seat majority in parliament last month, with Shas handing the coalition its 11 seats.

Shas chairman and Israel's interior minister, Aryeh Deri, said "darkness has descended on our world" following Baadani's death.

"Woe is the ship that has lost its captain," Deri wrote on Twitter.

An estimated five million children under the age of five died in 2021, the United Nations said Tuesday, urging health care investment in underserved communities around the globe to avoid this "immense, intolerable and mostly preventable loss of life."

"Every day, far too many parents are facing the trauma of losing their children, sometimes even before their first breath," said Vidhya Ganesh, a specialist with the UN's children's agency, UNICEF.

Bolstered Israeli restrictions against flying the Palestinian flag are "a shameless attempt to legitimise racism", rights group Amnesty International said Tuesday.

Israel's new firebrand National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered the police commander on Sunday to authorise officers to remove Palestinian flags flying in public spaces.

"I have instructed the Israeli police to enforce the ban on flying a PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) flag in public spaces, a sign of identification with a terrorist organisation", Ben-Gvir wrote on Twitter.