Young men on bikes and scooters zip through Cairo, Egypt's sprawling megalopolis, dodging cars to deliver more than a million orders each day, with little physical or legal protection.

Egypt's digital gig economy is growing, as economic pressures push more of its key demographic -– educated, urban youth –- into the work-on-demand model.

Engineer Mohamed Sherif, 37, joined online food ordering company Talabat as a bicycle courier in Alexandria three months ago because he couldn't find a job.

Recent deadly attacks by Palestinians have shown a shift in the dynamics of militancy in the West Bank, as armed factions play less of a role and individual grievances trump ideology, analysts say.

At a bustling market in the Palestinian political headquarters of Ramallah, customers clamour to get their hands on the latest hot trend.

This season, it is T-shirts printed with an M16 rifle.

Clothing store manager Ahmed Abu Hamza said he has sold 12,000 of the shirts in the past week.

"The demand is terrifying," he told AFP.

When Ghada Sabatien set out to visit her uncle in a village near Bethlehem, she was not expecting to be caught up in the spike in violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

But the unarmed 45-year-old, who was partially sighted and understood little Hebrew, bled to death in the street after "mistakenly" being shot by an Israeli soldier.

She leaves behind six orphans.

The West Bank village of Husan is usually a quiet backwater, despite being close to a major crossing into Israel.

Palestinian militants in Gaza and Israeli warplanes exchanged fire early Thursday in the biggest escalation in months, followed by fresh violence at Jerusalem's flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque.

Israel carried out air strikes in central Gaza after midnight, hours after a rocket fired by militants hit the garden of a house in southern Israel -- the first such fire to hit the Jewish state since January.

The military said it had hit an underground rocket factory, prompting another volley of at least four more rockets from the impoverished territory run by Islamist movement Hamas.

Iraq was hit Wednesday by its third heavy dust storm in two weeks, temporarily grounding flights at Baghdad and Najaf airports, as the weather phenomenon grows increasingly frequent.

The air in Baghdad was thick with a heavy sheet of grey and orange dust, while the state news agency INA cited the meteorological office as saying the latest storm was expected to lift on Thursday.

Flights were suspended at Baghdad International Airport due to poor visibility.

US President Joe Biden seems increasingly determined to keep the "terrorist" designation on Iran's Revolutionary Guards, which Tehran is demanding be removed before it returns to a deal on curbing its nuclear program.

"Each side is just hoping that the other would blink first," Ali Vaez, an Iran expert from the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention think tank, told AFP.

Negotiations opened a year ago in Vienna to revive the landmark 2015 agreement that was supposed to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Israeli and Palestinian leaders Tuesday to "end the cycle of violence" after a sharp escalation in tensions between the two sides in recent days.

In separate calls with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, Blinken stressed "the importance of Israelis and Palestinians working to end the cycle of violence in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza by exercising restraint and refraining from actions that escalate tensions," the State Department said.

In a "tunnel city" under the sandy soils of southern Gaza, Palestinian militants are preparing for the next conflict with Israel, as tensions in Jerusalem threaten to escalate.

The underground passageways leave no trace on the surface.

But in a wooded area near Khan Yunis, seven masked men in military fatigues carried a collection of machine-guns and grenade launchers into a tunnel entrance discretely tucked into the foot of a small hill.

Israel carried out its first air strike on the Gaza Strip in months early Tuesday, in response to a rocket fired from the Palestinian enclave after a weekend of violence around a Jerusalem holy site.

The army also said its special forces had made five arrests overnight in the occupied West Bank, which has seen a string of deadly Israeli raids since several recent fatal attacks against the Jewish state.

The latest tensions have focused on the highly contested Al-Aqsa mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem's Israeli-annexed Old City.

Violence may rage elsewhere, but it's business before politics in the occupied West Bank town of Nilin where Palestinian merchants do a brisk trade with passing Israelis.

Every day, hundreds of people from Israel and nearby West Bank settlements visit the town to take advantage of low prices on everything from groceries to car parts.

Nilin is no stranger to the realities of occupation -- a number of the town's residents have been killed in past clashes with Israeli forces.