Exiled Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani said Tuesday that she was filled with admiration for the protesters in Iran: "beautiful, feminine, hair in the wind, asking simply for freedom."

The 39-year-old star of films including "Extraction" and "Body of Lies", has lived in exile in France for more than a decade.

She has largely avoided politics in the past, but that has changed with the protests that broke out last month in Iran over the death in custody of a young woman arrested for breaking the strict Islamic dress code.

The Rosetta Stone stars in a new exhibition opening Thursday at the British Museum marking one of the most significant dates in Egyptology -- 200 years after a French scholar finally cracked its code and deciphered hieroglyphs.

The exhibition comes with the British Museum under pressure from some Egyptologists to hand the Rosetta Stone back to Cairo at a time when UK institutions are beginning to return to other countries artefacts looted during the colonial era.

An Israeli soldier was shot dead Tuesday near a settlement in the occupied West Bank in an attack claimed by Palestinian militants, the second deadly assault on armed forces within days.

Violence has surged in recent months in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, amid near daily West Bank raids and an uptick in attacks on Israeli troops.

The Israeli army said the soldier, identified as 21-year-old Ido Baroukh, was killed when "two assailants arrived in a vehicle adjacent to the community of Shavei Shomron and shot live fire," referring to an Israeli settlement.

The European Union's energy commissioner hailed a "long-term strategic partnership" with Algeria Tuesday as the bloc turns to Africa's biggest gas exporter to fill a gap left by Russian supplies.

"As the relationship with Russia, so far EU's biggest gas supplier, is irreversibly broken, we are turning to the EU's reliable suppliers to fill in the gap," said Kadri Simson.

"In this respect we are offering Algeria a long-term strategic partnership."

For over a decade, Iranian women who have ventured outdoors, even for a simple errand, have done so with the fear of running foul of the notorious morality police.

Those found in breach of the Islamic republic's strict dress code face being hauled into one of the vice units' green-and-white vans for a lecture on how to wear their headscarf, or a brutal beating.

"They caught me next to the metro station because I had a piercing and I was... not properly dressed", according to Iran's rules on modesty in public, Donya Fard, 26, told AFP.

Tunisian authorities intercepted nearly 200 migrants attempting to reach Europe northwards across the Mediterranean Sea over the weekend, the defence ministry said Tuesday.

"Coast guard patrols rescued 194 illegal migrants (118 Tunisians and 76 of other African nationalities) over the weekend," it said in a statement.

The "rescues" took place in nine separate operations off the southern and north-eastern coast.

Iraq's parliament will meet Thursday to "elect the president", speaker Mohammed al-Halbussi's office said, in a surprise move seen as trying to end months of political impasse.

The oil-rich country has yet to form a new government after general elections more than a year ago, and the parliament has already made three failed attempts this year to elect a new head of state, in February and March.

Halbussi's office said Tuesday that the parliamentary session in two days' time would have "a single item on the agenda, the election of the president of the Republic".

The Palestinian Islamist armed group Hamas that rules Gaza is reviving relations with the Iran-backed regime in Damascus after a decade-long rupture sparked by the outbreak of Syria's bloody civil war.

Analysts say the shift pushes Hamas deeper into the fold of the Iran-led "axis of resistance" against Israel that includes Syria as well as Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and Yemen's Huthi rebels.

Rights groups voiced alarm Tuesday over the extent of an Iranian crackdown on a Kurdish-populated city that has become a flashpoint for nationwide protests that have now lasted over three weeks.

Iran's clerical authorities have been shaken since mid-September by protests that erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year old Iranian of Kurdish origin who had been arrested by the notorious morality police.

Israel said Tuesday it has reached a US-brokered agreement with Lebanon to settle their long-disputed maritime border, hailing a "historic agreement" that potentially unlocks significant offshore gas production for both countries.

Lebanon said the proposed final text was "satisfactory", while US President Joe Biden praised the "breakthrough" and urged all parties to stick to the deal.

Negotiations between the neighbouring countries, which are still technically at war, had suffered repeated setbacks since their launch in 2020.