Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets again Monday in Syria's southern city of Sweida, local media and an activist reported, as dire living conditions stoke discontent in regime-held areas.

Days of rare protests have erupted in the south after the government lifted fuel subsidies last week, dealing a blow to Syrians already struggling with the heavy toll that 12 years of war have exacted on the economy.

A tense calm held Monday in Cyprus after the United Nations accused Turkish Cypriot forces of assaulting peacekeepers attempting to block construction of a road in the buffer zone.

It was the most serious incident of its kind in years on the divided east Mediterranean island and drew widespread international condemnation.

The confrontation occurred on Friday in Pyla, an ethnically mixed village in the UN-patrolled buffer zone between the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus in the south and a breakaway Turkish Cypriot statelet in the north.

Syrians in the country's rebel-held north on Monday marked the 10-year anniversary of chemical attacks that killed more than 1,400 people near Damascus, one of the conflict's many horrors that went unpunished.

"I was in such shock. I smelt death," said Mohammed Sleiman, a paramedic from Zamalka in Eastern Ghouta who lost five members of his family that day.

On August 21, 2013, regime forces attacked Eastern Ghouta and Moadamiyet al-Sham, rebel-held areas outside the capital.

An Israeli settler was killed in a drive-by shooting Monday near the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, the latest fatality amid rising violence in the Palestinian territory.

Israeli forces have been searching for suspects in the latest attack as well as in a Saturday shooting that killed two Israelis in the northern West Bank.

Israeli medics said a woman was "confirmed dead" after being shot near the southern city of Hebron.

A man travelling with her in a car was in a "serious condition", the Magen David Adom emergency service said in a statement.

Saudi border guards fired "like rain" on Ethiopian migrants trying to cross into the Gulf kingdom from Yemen, killing hundreds since last year, Human Rights Watch said in a report Monday.

The allegations, described as "unfounded" by a Saudi government source, point to a significant escalation of abuses along the perilous route from the Horn of Africa to Saudi Arabia, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians live and work.

Iraqi authorities on Sunday ordered the shutdown of LED advertisement screens installed across Baghdad after a hacker managed to show a pornographic film on one, security forces said, announcing the arrest of a suspect.

On Saturday evening, "a person managed to hack into an advertising screen in Uqba bin Nafia Square", a major intersection at the centre of the Iraqi capital, a security source who requested anonymity told AFP.

The hacker "showed a pornographic film for several minutes before we cut the power cable," he said.

Schools were shut Sunday in the occupied West Bank town of Huwara as troops searched for the suspected killer of an Israeli father and his son who were shot dead over the weekend.

The two Israeli men were gunned down Saturday at a car wash in Huwara, in the latest attack to rock the territory where violence has surged this year.

Israeli media identified the two as Shay Silas Nigrekar, 60, and Aviad Nir, 28.

Saudi Arabia's extraordinary football expansion is a "long-term project" with strong government support, unlike the short-lived Chinese boom, a senior league official told AFP.

The Saudi Pro League has a years-long commitment from the oil-rich kingdom's rulers in its goal to become one of the world's top competitions, chief operating officer Carlo Nohra said.

Nohra was speaking at Al-Hilal's unveiling of Brazilian superstar Neymar, who joins Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and a host of other big names in a spending binge costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Iranian police have arrested the head of a real estate agency after a viral video showed his firm selling an apartment to a dog, officials said on Sunday.

In the video, which spread widely over the weekend, an Iranian couple signed a contract transferring title of their apartment to their furry, white, small-breed dog.

The animal, named "Chester", placed its paws on an ink pad with the help of a woman before the contract was stamped.

She said in the video that the couple had no "heirs and that they wanted to sell the apartment to the dog."

On a riverbank in war-ravaged Syria's north, felling has reduced what was once a lush forest to dispersed trees and decimated trunks poking out from dry, crumbly soil.

Twelve years of conflict that led to a spike in illegal logging, along with the effects of climate change and other factors, have eroded Syria's greenery.

The dwindling forest on the shores of the Euphrates river "is shrinking every year", said Ahmed al-Sheikh, 40, a supermarket owner in the village of Jaabar, in the Kurdish-held part of Syria's Raqa province.