Syrian counter-narcotics units seized a record haul of 2.3 tonnes of the amphetamine-type stimulant known as captagon, the interior ministry announced Wednesday.

Law enforcement officers had earlier discovered 249 kilos of captagon hidden in steel machinery inside containers ready to leave the Mediterranean port of Latakia.

The ensuing investigation alerted the authorities "to the existence of a warehouse containing drugs on a farm" in the nearby province of Hama, a ministry statement said.

Turkey said Wednesday it would seek the extradition of 33 alleged Kurdish militants and coup plot suspects from Sweden and Finland under a deal to secure Ankara's support for the Nordic countries' NATO membership bids.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dropped weeks of resistance to Sweden and Finland joining NATO after crunch talks ahead of Wednesday's NATO summit in Madrid, focused on Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

A Palestinian gunman from the Islamic Jihad militant group was shot dead by Israeli troops during clashes Wednesday in Jenin, a flash point in the occupied West Bank hit by waves of recent violence.

Mohammad Marei, 25, died from a bullet wound to the chest, the Palestinian health ministry said.

Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian armed group present in the West Bank and the Israeli-blockaded Gaza strip, said in a statement that Marei was one of their fighters and a "martyr" who died while confronting a raid "by occupation forces... in Jenin at dawn on Wednesday".

Israel's Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Wednesday he would not stand in upcoming elections, as parliament postponed a vote to dissolve itself and force the country's fifth vote in less than four years.

The premier, who conceded last week that his eight-party alliance which took office a year ago was no longer tenable, is due to hand power to Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who will lead a caretaker government into polls that could come as soon as October.

In one of Saudi artist Ahmed Mater's best-known works, a silhouette of a gas pump morphs into a man holding a gun to his head –- a clear critique of oil's damaging influence.

Yet for several years, most Saudis couldn't see the piece, titled "Evolution of Man", as local curators deemed it too sensitive to show in the oil-reliant kingdom.

Its inclusion in a recent exhibition in the capital Riyadh is just one sign of changing times.

An Egyptian court on Tuesday sentenced a man to death for the murder of a student after she rejected his advances, a judicial source said, in a case that sparked widespread outrage.

Mohamed Adel was found guilty of the "premeditated murder" of fellow university student Nayera Ashraf after he confessed to the crime in court, the source told AFP.

The verdict, handed down in Mansoura north of Cairo after the trial opened on Sunday, will now be referred to the grand mufti, Egypt's top theological authority -- a formality in death penalty cases.

More than 100 people, including many women, have been murdered in a Syrian camp in just 18 months, the UN said Tuesday, demanding countries repatriate their citizens.

The Al-Hol camp is increasingly unsafe and the child detainees are being condemned to a life with no future, said Imran Riza, the UN resident coordinator in Syria.

Al-Hol, in the Kurdish-controlled northeast, was meant as a temporary detention facility.

An Iranian appeals court has upheld an eight-year prison sentence against a Frenchman convicted on spying charges, his Paris-based lawyer said Tuesday.

Benjamin Briere was arrested in May 2020 after taking pictures in a national park with a recreational drone. His lawyers and family have accused Iran of holding him as a "hostage".

The lawyer, Philippe Valent, said Briere's case was being "instrumentalised" by the Iranian authorities.

Chief negotiators from the United States and Iran began indirect talks in Qatar on Tuesday, bidding to remove obstacles that have stalled attempts to revive a landmark nuclear deal.

The indirect negotiations headed by US special envoy Robert Malley and Iran's Ali Bagheri come after more than a year of European Union-mediated talks in Vienna on a return to the 2015 agreement between Tehran and world powers.

Jordan's public prosecutor on Tuesday launched an investigation into a chlorine gas leak that killed 13 people and injured more than 300 in the coastal city of Aqaba.

Five foreigners including at least four Asian nationals where among those killed on Monday when a tank of the toxic gas fell on the dockside in the Red Sea port, officials said.

A judicial source told AFP that the country's public prosecutor and team of forensic experts had moved "to examine and collect samples and evidence at the scene of the accident and initiate investigation procedures".