More than a week since Israeli air strikes smashed into a Gaza Strip highrise, local resident Said Bessia pointed to a hole punched through concrete where a missile killed an Islamic Jihad commander.

"This is where he was sitting," Bessia said, referring to Tayseer al-Jabari, who was meeting several top militants on the sixth floor of the Palestine Tower building.

The August 5 strikes were among the first of a three-day bombardment of the densely populated Palestinian enclave which, even the militants acknowledged, dealt a blow to their leadership.

Iran on Monday denied any link with the attacker of British author Salman Rushdie but blamed the writer himself for "insulting" Islam in the novel "The Satanic Verses".

"We categorically deny" any link with the attack and "no one has the right to accuse the Islamic Republic of Iran", said foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani in Tehran's first official reaction to Friday's stabbing.

"In this attack, we do not consider anyone other than Salman Rushdie and his supporters worthy of blame and even condemnation," he said.

A French-Iranian academic held in Iran for the past three years in a case that has raised tensions between Tehran and Paris has returned to prison after a brief furlough, her supporters said.

Fariba Adelkhah was last week allowed to leave Tehran's Evin prison for five days.

Hopes that the measure may be extended were not fulfilled, her support group said in a statement published late Sunday.

"Unfortunately, Fariba's five-day leave was not extended, or transformed into house arrest," it said. "It gave her a break, but it's still bad news."

Egyptians voiced outrage Monday over reports that firefighters and paramedics took over an hour to respond to a blaze that tore through a Coptic Christian church and killed 41 people.

Grief has spread over Sunday's fire among Copts, the Middle East's largest Christian community, which makes up at least 10 million of Muslim-majority Egypt's population of 103 million.

But many other Egyptians have also voiced outrage over the disaster in the now scorched Abu Sifin church, located in the greater Cairo neighbourhood of Imbaba west of the Nile River.

Israeli security forces shot dead a Palestinian man they said had tried to stab an officer during a home raid searching for weapons in east Jerusalem early Monday.

The man, identified by Palestinians as Mohammed al-Shaham, 21, was "neutralised" and died in an Israeli military hospital, police said.

The man's father, Ibrahim al-Shaham, told AFP that his son was shot in the head at point-blank range and was left bleeding for 40 minutes.

Israeli air strikes on Syria killed three soldiers and wounded three others on Friday, state media said, after the latest such incident in the war-torn country.

"The aggression led to the death of three soldiers, the wounding of three others," Syria's official news agency SANA said, quoting a military source.

Since civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes inside the country, targeting government positions as well as allied Iran-backed forces and Hezbollah fighters.

Israel's former army chief Gadi Eisenkot said on Sunday that he is joining a new party headed by Defence Minister Benny Gantz ahead of a general election in November.

Recent media reports had said that Eisenkot, chief of staff from 2015 to 2019, was being courted by political parties including Prime Minister Yair Lapid's centrist Yesh Atid.

But on Sunday Eisenkot announced he will join forces with Gantz, himself a former army chief, and Justice Minister Gideon Saar to form the new centre-right "National Unity Party", or Hamahane Hamamlachti in Hebrew.

Salman Rushdie is on the road to recovery and showing signs of his "feisty and defiant" self, family and friends said Sunday, days after a shocking assault left him on a ventilator with multiple stab wounds.

Just hours after Friday's attack at a literary event in western New York state, the British author had undergone emergency surgery for potentially life-threatening injuries.

But his condition, while still serious, has since shown clear signs of improvement and he no longer requires assisted breathing.

Hundreds of Sudanese rallied on Sunday in support of a political initiative backed by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan who led last year's military coup, AFP correspondents said.

The rallies took place outside a Khartoum conference hall where meetings have been held since Saturday by a recently-established initiative aimed at ending Sudan's political crisis.

The initiative, known as "The Call of Sudan's People", was launched last month by renowned Sufi religious leader Al-Tayeb Al-Jed.

Iraq's judiciary said Sunday it lacks the authority to dissolve parliament as demanded by populist Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr, who is engaged in an escalating standoff with political rivals.

Followers of Sadr, in defiance of his Shiite rivals of the pro-Iran Coordination Framework, have been staging a sit-in protest at Iraq's parliament.

In the latest twist to the political turmoil, the firebrand cleric has urged the judiciary to dissolve parliament by the end of this week to pave the way for new legislative elections.