The United Arab Emirates on Wednesday pledged an additional $50 million in assistance to quake-hit Syria, the official WAM news agency said, bringing the total value of pledges to more than $100 million.

The announcement came more than nine days after the 7.8-magnitude quake struck Syria and Turkey, killing nearly 40,000 people.

It also followed an appeal by the United Nations on Tuesday for $397 million to help earthquake victims in the war-scarred country, where the disaster has left millions in desperate need of aid.

Tunisia's main opposition coalition on Wednesday slammed a string of "repressive" arrests mainly targeting critics of President Kais Saied, including members of the Islamist-inspired Ennahdha party.

Police in the North African country -- birthplace of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings -- have arrested 10 public figures since Saturday, also including the director of a popular radio station and a prominent businessman.

Five Western governments said this week they were "deeply troubled" by the Israeli government's decision to give retroactive permission to nine settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank and build new homes.

The opposition voiced by the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the United States has drawn attention to Israel's settlement policy. Here are answers to some key questions:

- What are settlements? -

Settlements are Israeli villages, towns and even cities built on territory Israel seized during the Six-Day War of 1967.

Israel's far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, long accused of inflaming Jewish-Arab tensions, has set his sights on one of the conflict's most sensitive issues: Palestinian prisoners.

Since joining Israel's new government led by veteran Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu late last year, Ben-Gvir has pledged to ensure Palestinian inmates are not being treated too comfortably.

Behind a dark and opaque storefront in Tel Aviv, an Israeli company is speeding up online shopping by replacing staff with robots that manoeuvre around small storerooms.

Whirring along a rail between two long shelves packed with coffee capsules, a robot stopped, pivoted to the right, shone a light before grabbing an item and dropping it into a paper bag.

"Shoppers want to receive their items faster and faster," said Eyal Yair, co-founder and CEO of 1MRobotics, which built the automated storeroom late last year.

Egypt, sapped dry of dollars despite a $3 billion International Monetary Fund bailout loan, is seeking to boost its coffers by selling state assets to wealthy Gulf nations.

Experts say the deals could be a win-win for all sides, but unlike old Gulf largesse of unconditional aid, the new deals will require reforms.

Cairo hopes the cash injection will plug what the IMF warns is "a financing gap of about $17 billion over the next four years".

Western tourists, who flocked to Iran just a few years ago, are being advised by their governments to stay away, forcing the Islamic republic's struggling tourism industry to look elsewhere.

Hoping for better days, tourism professionals are wooing visitors from countries like China and Russia which maintain good ties with Iran.

Westerners have long been attracted to Iran's many ancient and Islamic sites, its mountain scenery and its millennia-old culture.

Archaeologists in southern Iraq have uncovered the remains of a tavern dating back nearly 5,000 years they hope will illuminate the lives of ordinary people in the world's first cities.

The US-Italian team made the find in the ruins of ancient Lagash, northeast of the modern city of Nasiriyah, which was already known to have been one of the first urban centres of the Sumerian civilisation of ancient Iraq.

The headscarf-covered woman could not contain her rage.

Selva was certain that dozens of her loved ones remained buried in the rubble of Turkey's catastrophic quake.

"But the rescuers have left," Selva cried beside one of the myriad bonfires protecting survivors from the bitter cold.

The 48-year-old woman watched Turkish and international teams scour through the remains of her building in Turkey's shattered Syrian border region city of Antakya.

Each one of them gave up before finding her relatives.

A Saudi Arabian plane carrying aid to quake-hit Syria landed in second city Aleppo Tuesday -- the first in more than a decade of war, a transport ministry official told AFP.

Planeloads of foreign aid have landed in Syria since a 7.8-magnitude quake struck the war-torn country and neighbouring Turkey killing more than 35,000 people.

"This is the first plane from Saudi Arabia to land on Syrian territory in more than 10 years," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to speak to the press.