When Iranian chess champion Sara Khadem played in Kazakhstan in December without a hijab in solidarity with the mass protests back home, her life changed dramatically.

Under the Islamic Republic's strict dress code, women must cover their heads in public and while representing Iran abroad.

The 25-year-old grandmaster thought her defiance might earn her a travel ban as had happened before. Instead she was forced to flee into exile to avoid arrest after she refused to record a video saying she had been pressured into not wearing a hijab.

The United Arab Emirates has opened a centre housing a mosque, church and the country's first official synagogue with the aim of promoting interfaith coexistence in the Muslim nation.

The oil-rich Gulf federation, which normalised relations with Israel in 2020, is home to a small but active Jewish community that usually prays in private.

With three houses of worship in the same place, the Abrahamic Family House, inaugurated on Thursday in the capital Abu Dhabi, is the first of its kind.

A desert bloom triggered by heavier than usual winter rains has carpeted the sands of northern Saudi Arabia with purple flowers, drawing sightseers from across the Arabian Peninsula.

Muhammad al-Mutairi drove nearly six hours from his hometown in the centre of the kingdom to see the rare burst of colour in the drab landscape.

"No one expects that this scene is in Saudi Arabia," the 50-year-old retired teacher told AFP as he surveyed the sea of purple stretching as far as the eye can see in the desert around Rafha, close to the Iraqi border.

Five Syrian children and their parents died on Friday in a fire that struck a Turkish home they moved to after surviving last week's earthquake, local media reported.

The family had relocated to the central region of Konya from the southeastern Turkish city of Nurdagi, which was badly hit by the February 6 quake, to stay with relatives.

The death toll from the 7.8-magnitude quake that hit southeastern Turkey and Syria has crossed 41,000 -- the deadliest natural disaster in the region in centuries.

Mass protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government focusing on deeply controversial reforms of the judicial system have united diverse groups fearing it would give the legislative branch nearly unchecked authority.

Netanyahu and his allies in government, the most right-wing in Israel's history, say the reforms are necessary to correct an imbalance that has given judges too much power over elected officials.

The death toll from the earthquake that has devastated parts of Turkey and Syria exceeded 41,000 on Friday as the United Nations appealed for $1 billion to address a growing humanitarian crisis.

Eleven days after the quake -- now one of the 10 deadliest in the past 100 years -- Turkish rescuers pulled a 17-year-old girl and a woman in her 20s out of the rubble.

"She looked to be in good health. She opened and closed her eyes," coal miner Ali Akdogan said after participating in the rescue of Aleyna Olmez in Kahramanmaras, a city near the quake's epicentre.

The United States on Thursday voiced opposition to a proposed UN Security Council resolution that would demand Israel end settlements in the occupied territories, despite Washington's criticism of its ally on the issue.

Days ahead of a Security Council meeting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a draft resolution seen by AFP would demand that Israel "immediately and completely cease" settlement activities in occupied Palestinian areas.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday thanked his "Arab brothers" for aid supplied following last week's deadly earthquake, that saw countries in the region break with years of diplomatic silence.

The 7.8-magnitude quake hit Turkey and Syria on February 6, leaving a combined death toll of nearly 40,000 people.

Since then, Assad has received calls from the leaders of several Arab countries, including those that cut off ties with Syria over a decade ago over bloodshed during its civil war.

Dozens of arms frantically reach for heaters and blankets handed out by a private donor, illustrating the desperation and rage gripping swathes of Turkey 11 days after its disastrous quake.

Many in the Syrian border region town of Samandag listened to their relatives and friends slowly die under the rubble as they waited for rescuers who came too late.

And those who survived the February 6 disaster have been living on the streets, freezing when the winter temperatures plunge after dark.

When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan assumed sweeping powers in 2018, he swore the state would deliver more under a centralised system that his critics compare to one-man rule.

Five years on, an agonisingly slow response to a catastrophic quake has undermined that idea, boosting the opposition's case in polls planned for May, experts say.

Erdogan has acknowledged "shortcomings" in the government's handling of Turkey's deadliest disaster of its post-Ottoman history.