US President Joe Biden will meet with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman next month, abandoning efforts to ostracize the kingdom's de facto leader over the horrific murder of a dissident.

The White House ended weeks of speculation Tuesday, announcing that Biden will travel to Israel, the Palestinian West Bank, and Saudi Arabia from July 13-16 -- his first trip to the Middle East since taking office.

In addition to meetings with individual leaders in all three places, he will attend a regional Gulf Cooperation Council summit in Saudi Arabia.

Iran on Tuesday said it still believes that negotiations can succeed to revive the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, despite a recent rebuke from the UN nuclear watchdog.

Tehran last week condemned as "unconstructive" a move by the International Atomic Energy Agency to censure the country for failure to cooperate over its nuclear programme.

It also disconnected some of its cameras at nuclear sites, a move the IAEA warned could deal a "fatal blow" to negotiations to revive the nuclear deal.

US President Joe Biden will make history next month with a direct flight between Israel and Saudi Arabia where he will meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, abandoning efforts to ostracize the oil kingdom's de facto leader over the murder of a dissident.

The White House ended weeks of speculation Tuesday, announcing that Biden will travel to Israel, the Palestinian West Bank and Saudi Arabia from July 13-16.

The European Union wants to strengthen its energy cooperation with Israel in light of Russia's use of gas supplies to "blackmail" its members over the Ukraine conflict, the European Commission chief said Tuesday.

Ursula von der Leyen's remarks came as Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, also visiting Israel, said Rome was seeking to boost gas supplies from Israel as EU members eye options to diminish their reliance on Russian energy.

The European Union wants to strengthen its energy cooperation with Israel in light of Russia's use of gas supplies to "blackmail" its members over the Ukraine conflict, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday.

"The Kremlin has used our dependency on Russian fossil fuels to blackmail us," she said in a speech at the Ben Gurion University in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.

Avraham B. Yehoshua, one of Israel's most revered and prolific novelists and a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights, has died aged 85, Tel Aviv's Ichilov hospital said Tuesday.

Yehoshua, who was born in Jerusalem in 1936 to parents with roots in Greece and Morocco, published his first collection of short stories in 1963.

Decades of critically-acclaimed writing saw him win a string of international awards and his works translated into more than 30 languages.

Microscopic air pollution caused mostly by burning fossil fuels shortens lives worldwide by more than two years, researchers reported Tuesday.

Across South Asia, the average person would live five years longer if levels of fine particulate matter met World Health Organization standards, according to a report from the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute.

Five Iranian crew of a cargo plane grounded in Argentina since last week have had their passports temporarily seized pending a probe into possible links to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, officials said Monday.

A judge on Monday ordered their travel documents held for an additional 72 hours after Security Minister Anibal Fernandez said information had been received from "foreign organizations" that some among the crew may be linked to companies with ties to the Guards.

The Revolutionary Guards, Iran's ideological army, is on a US blacklist of foreign "terrorist organizations."

The United Nations is launching a crowd-funding campaign for an operation intended to prevent an ageing Yemeni oil tanker from unleashing a potentially catastrophic spill in the Red Sea, a senior official said Monday.

"We hope to raise $5 million by the end of June," David Gressly, the UN's humanitarian coordinator for the war-hit country, told an online press briefing, adding it was an "ambitious" target.

Iraq, an oil-rich but poverty-stricken country battered by decades of war and insurgency, has been mired in a long political crisis that just took a turn for the worse.

Shiite Muslim firebrand cleric and former anti-US militia leader Moqtada Sadr on Sunday sparked fresh turmoil when his followers, the biggest bloc in parliament, resigned en masse.

The move deepened uncertainty in a country where democratic institutions built since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein remain fragile and Iran wields major influence.