Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sealed his return to power Thursday, as the final vote count from elections this week gave him and his far-right allies a clear majority in parliament.

Results released by the electoral commission said that with 99 percent of votes counted, Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party had earned 32 seats in Israel's 120-seat parliament, the Knesset.

That combined with 18 for two ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties and 14 for the rising extreme-right alliance called Religious Zionism gave the bloc supporting Netanyahu 64 seats.

Algeria's president called Tuesday for Arab unity to face escalating "tensions and crises" as he opened the first Arab League summit since a string of normalisation deals with Israel divided the region.

Abdelmadjid Tebboune told the meeting's inaugural session that "our central and primary cause remains the Palestinian cause".

The Algerian president also warned that "exceptional global conditions are creating polarisation... which is impacting our food security", without directly mentioning Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Israeli politicians made their final campaign pitches before the divided country on Tuesday holds its fifth election in less than four years, with hawkish ex-premier Benjamin Netanyahu eyeing a comeback.

The 73-year-old Likud party leader served as prime minister for longer than anyone in Israel's history before he was ousted in June 2021 by an ideologically-divided coalition forged by the current caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

Iran announced Monday a suspected accomplice of the shooter who carried out a deadly attack on a Shiite Muslim shrine in Shiraz has been arrested, state news agency IRNA reported.

At least 13 people were killed last Wednesday in the Shah Cheragh mausoleum in the southern city, according to a revised official toll, in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.

State media had initially given a death toll of 15.

An American woman who grew up on a farm in Kansas, converted to Islam and joined the Islamic State in Syria, where she led an all-female military battalion, is to be sentenced Tuesday for providing support to a foreign terrorist group.

Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, faces up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to terror charges in June in a US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia.

It was the river that is said to have watered the biblical Garden of Eden and helped give birth to civilisation itself.

But today the Tigris is dying.

Human activity and climate change have choked its once mighty flow through Iraq, where -- with its twin river the Euphrates -- it made Mesopotamia a cradle of civilisation thousands of years ago.

Iraq may be oil-rich but the country is plagued by poverty after decades of war and by droughts and desertification.

Iranian protesters rallied again Sunday, defying an order by the powerful Revolutionary Guards to stop the demonstrations -- now in their seventh week -- sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini.

Students gathered overnight and Sunday across Iran, even after Major General Hossein Salami, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, had warned demonstrators: "Do not come to the streets!"

Arab leaders are to meet in the Algerian capital on Tuesday for their first summit since a string of normalisation deals with Israel that have divided the region.

The 22-member Arab League held its last summit in 2019, prior to both the coronavirus pandemic and the UAE's historic US-backed deal establishing diplomatic ties with the Jewish state.

The agreement, only Israel's third such deal with an Arab state, was followed by similar accords with Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, deepening the kingdom's decades-old rivalry with its neighbour Algeria.

Israelis on Sunday shot dead a Palestinian who, according to the army and medics, had rammed his car into soldiers in the occupied West Bank.

The incident near the city of Jericho comes amid mounting violence across Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

"An assailant accelerated his vehicle toward IDF (Israeli army) soldiers who were at a bus station adjacent to the Nabi Musa Junction," the army said, before he continued and drove at other soldiers nearby.

US oil giant ConocoPhillips on Sunday agreed to take another major stake in Qatar's expansion of natural gas production, the Gulf state's energy minister said.

Energy Minister Saad Sherida al-Kaabi also said Qatar was talking with Asian nations -- the major market for Qatari gas -- over a share in its campaign to increase annual production by 60 percent to 126 million tonnes a year by 2027.