Saudi Arabia and Israel voiced optimism Wednesday that they were moving closer to a historic normalization of ties as Iran -- their common foe -- accused the kingdom of betraying the Palestinians through the US-led effort.

US President Joe Biden is hoping to transform the Middle East -- and score an election-year diplomatic victory -- by securing recognition of the Jewish state by Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Islam's two holiest sites.

In Libya's flood-hit city of Derna, the Mediterranean Sea breeze mixes with the nauseating stench of human remains buried under the mud-caked rubble.

Ten days after a tsunami-scale flash flood ripped through the coastal city, razing entire neighbourhoods, many of the traumatised survivors are still waiting to learn the fate of missing relatives.

Few of them have any hope of seeing their loved ones alive.

Floods that killed thousands in the Libyan city of Derna also inundated one of the country's premier ancient sites, threatening its UNESCO-listed monuments with collapse, a recent visitor and a leading archaeologist said.

The immediate damage to the monuments of Cyrene, which include the second century AD Temple of Zeus, bigger than the Parthenon in Athens, is relatively minor but the water circulating around their foundations threatens future collapses, the head of the French archaeological mission in Libya, Vincent Michel, told AFP.

Saudi Arabia and the Iran-backed Huthi rebels put a positive spin on historic but inconclusive talks in Riyadh on Wednesday as diplomatic efforts increased to end Yemen's bitter war.

The five days of talks were "positive", Saudi officials and a senior Huthi said, after the rebel delegation ended the first public visit to the Saudi capital since hostilities broke out between the two sides.

Israeli forces killed a 19-year-old Palestinian in a pre-dawn raid in the West Bank on Wednesday, the Palestinian health ministry said, as violence in the occupied territory showed no sign of any letup.

Durgham al-Akhras was killed in a clash with Israeli soldiers raiding Aqabat Jaber refugee camp near the city of Jericho to carry out arrests, the ministry said.

The Israeli army said "explosive devices" were hurled at troops, who "responded with live fire toward one of the suspects and neutralised him," a statement said.

US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to smooth over tensions at talks Wednesday, hailing "unbreakable" ties despite Biden's concerns over the state of Israeli democracy.

The veteran leaders shook hands against a backdrop of flags in New York, as they met for the first time since Netanyahu was re-elected in December at the head of a hard-right government pushing controversial judicial reforms.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday announced it had transferred ownership of two antiquities to Yemen, but that the war-torn country had agreed to leave them in New York for safe-keeping.

Both pieces are stone sculptures -- a sandstone female figure and a marble mortar -- and date to the third millennium BCE from areas in modern-day Yemen, the Met said in a statement.

The museum said it had acquired the statue in 1998 from collector Jean-Luc Chalmin, who also donated the mortar in 1999.

Muslim leaders addressing the United Nations on Tuesday berated the West over burnings of the Koran, denouncing the acts protected as free speech as discriminatory.

Sweden has seen a series of burnings of the Islamic holy book, with the government voicing condemnation but saying it cannot stop acts protected under laws on free expression.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- who has put pressure for months on Sweden over its welcome to Kurdish activists Turkey sees as terrorists -- said that Western countries were seeing "a plague" of racism including Islamophobia.

UN aid for civilians on Tuesday entered rebel-held northwest Syria from Turkey via the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, the first such convoy since a Security Council mechanism expired in July.

The convoy "consists of 17 trucks loaded with various relief materials from the United Nations", said Mazen Alloush, a border official on the rebel-held side.

An AFP correspondent saw trucks pass through the crossing bearing signs with the logo of the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Many of the most polluting countries are failing to cut carbon emissions from their energy sectors quickly enough to meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a watchdog said on Tuesday.

The report comes days after the United Nations said the world was facing catastrophic climate change and was perilously far from meeting goals for slashing carbon pollution.

Slashing greenhouse gas emissions from the highly polluting power generation sector is vital to meet the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement.