Israeli protesters thronged the heart of Tel Aviv Saturday for a 20th straight week, keeping up their campaign against the hard-right government's controversial judicial reform plans which they view as a threat to democracy.
Numbers had been down the previous week as Israel cities came under rocket fire during a five-day flare-up with Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad.
Air strikes and artillery exchanges shook the Sudanese capital Saturday and armed men ransacked the Qatari embassy as the country's warring generals kept up their struggle for control.
Khartoum residents told AFP that heavy fighting raged despite repeated international calls for a humanitarian truce.
The area around the state television building in Khartoum's sister city Omdurman was one of the sites bombarded, witnesses said.
One man is revered in Western capitals for standing up to Russia's full-scale invasion of his country.
The other is widely reviled for atrocities committed against his own people in a war that has made him dependent on Moscow.
At the Arab League summit on Friday, host Saudi Arabia brought Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Syrian counterpart, Bashar al-Assad, to the same conference hall on the Red Sea coast –- a potent sign of the kingdom's global diplomatic ambitions.
The world's chemical weapons watchdog on Friday failed to agree a roadmap for the next five years because of deep divisions between Western powers, and Russia and Syria.
Member states of the Organisation for the Prohibition for Chemical Weapons (OPCW) meet every five years to assess progress on a 1997 agreement to rid the globe of toxic arms.
But the 193 countries could not nail down a deal after this week's meeting in The Hague, during which Moscow and its allies traded barbs with Western states.
Hundreds protested in rebel-held northern Syria on Friday against President Bashar al-Assad's participation in the Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia after a more than decade-long suspension, AFP correspondents reported.
Demonstrators in the town of Azaz chanted: "The people want the fall of the regime," rallying cry of the protests of 2011 that were bloodily suppressed by Assad's government triggering more than a decade of civil war.
Sudan's de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan sacked his deputy-turned-rival Mohamed Hamdan Daglo Friday, as forces loyal to the feuding generals pressed on with fighting in both Khartoum and Darfur.
The United Nations meanwhile warned that humanitarian needs are increasing in Sudan, with aid chief Martin Griffith allocating $22 million in emergency funds to help Sudanese fleeing the violence.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused some Arab leaders of ignoring the horrors of Russia's invasion of his country during a speech Friday at an Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia.
"Unfortunately, there are some in the world and here, among you, who turn a blind eye to those cages and illegal annexations," Zelensky told Arab heads of state, urging them to "take an honest look" at the war.
Zelensky's surprise trip to the summit in the Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah was his first to the Middle East since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
On a scorching sidewalk, Ibrahim Said hopes to withdraw his savings from a Sudanese bank, but the wait seems as unending as the war that has brought the country's financial system to a standstill.
Said is one of dozens of depositors who have queued at a branch of the Bank of Khartoum in Madani, a city about 160 kilometres (100 miles) southeast of the capital, to recover their savings.
"I have been here since seven in the morning hoping to withdraw money from my account," he told AFP.
Iran on Friday executed three men convicted of killing security force members during protests triggered by Mahsa Amini's death last year, drawing condemnation from Western governments.
Majid Kazemi, Saleh Mirhashemi and Saeed Yaghoubi were found guilty of "moharebeh" -- or waging "war against God" -- for shooting dead three members of the security forces at a demonstration in the central city of Isfahan on November 16, the judiciary said on its Mizan Online news website.
Arab leaders welcomed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad back into the fold Friday at a summit in Saudi Arabia that also grappled with conflicts across the Middle East and beyond.
A triumphant Assad called for a "new phase" in regional cooperation in his remarks to the summit, which also featured a surprise appearance by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a sign of host Saudi Arabia's growing diplomatic clout.
