Human Rights Watch Monday accused the government in Damascus and Turkey of exacerbating Syria's deadly cholera outbreak by restricting aid and water-flow to the country's Kurdish-held northeast.

Syria has recorded 81 deaths and more than 24,000 suspected cases of the extremely virulent disease since September, according to the World Health Organization, in the country's first outbreak for more than a decade.

Ankara has "failed to ensure" adequate water flow down the Euphrates river and supply from the strategic Turkish-controlled Alouk water station, HRW said.

Britain and France on Monday raised the case of a dissident hunger striker with Egypt's President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, a day after the jailed activist started refusing water.

Alaa Abdel Fattah, a British-Egyptian, stopped drinking water on Sunday to coincide with the opening of the COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron both met directly with Sisi and upped the pressure for his release, hours after three Egyptian journalists said they had begun their own hunger strikes over his fate.

French construction firm Vinci said on Monday it expected to be charged this week by a magistrate investigating allegedly abusive work practices on its building sites in Qatar.

The group said its subsidiary Vinci Constructions Grands Projets had been summoned on Wednesday by a French magistrate investigating its infrastructure projects in Qatar "with a view to it being charged".

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on Monday deplored the fate of thousands of children living in "a giant open air prison" at Syria's notorious Al-Hol camp.

Al-Hol is the largest camp for displaced people who fled after Kurdish-led forces backed by a US-led coalition dislodged Islamic State group fighters from their last scrap of territory in Syria in 2019.

In the country's northeast near Iraq, Al-Hol is overpopulated with more than 50,000 residents including relatives of suspected jihadists, displaced Syrians, and Iraqi refugees.

The UN's chief warned Monday that nations must cooperate or face "collective suicide" in the fight against climate change, at a summit where developing countries reeling from global warming demanded more action from rich polluters.

Nearly 100 heads of state and government are meeting for two days in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, facing calls to deepen emissions cuts and financially back developing countries already devastated by the effects of rising temperatures.

"Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish," Guterres told the UN COP27 summit.

Syrian regime rocket fire on Sunday killed 10 people including three children at makeshift camps for displaced people in the country's last major rebel-held bastion, a war monitor said.

The dead included eight civilians and two unidentified individuals, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, revising up an earlier toll of nine killed.

Another 77 people were reported injured in bouts of rocket fire.

More than 30 rockets exploded in the morning in several areas, including the camps, situated west of the city of Idlib in Syria's northwest.

UN climate negotiations on Sunday offered a sliver of hope and "solidarity" for developing countries battered by increasingly costly impacts of global warming, in agreeing to discuss the thorny issue of money for "loss and damage".

Countries least responsible for planet-heating emissions -- but hardest hit by an onslaught of weather extremes -- have been ramping up the pressure on wealthy polluting nations to provide financial help for accelerating damages.

New protests erupted in Iran on Sunday at universities and in the largely Kurdish northwest, keeping a seven-week anti-regime movement going even in the face of a fierce crackdown.

The protests, triggered in mid-September by the death of Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for allegedly breaching strict dress rules for women, have evolved into the biggest challenge for the clerical leadership since the 1979 revolution.

One whiff of a fragrance is all Syrian perfumer Mohammad al-Masri needs to recreate the scent of a luxury brand -- without the label and for a fraction of the cost.

Dozens of customers flock daily to his tiny store, nestled in the historic market of Damascus's old city, many flashing photos on their phones of high-end perfumes they want to replicate.

"All I have is my shop, and this nose I've been training since I was 15," the 55-year-old told AFP, pointing at his face.

"I don't have a big workshop or high-end equipment."

Jailed Egyptian dissident Alaa Abdel Fattah has stopped drinking water, his family said Sunday, escalating his hunger strike as world leaders arrive in the country for the COP27 climate summit.

A major figure in the 2011 revolt that toppled longtime president Hosni Mubarak, British-Egyptian Abdel Fattah is currently serving a five-year sentence for "broadcasting false news", having already spent much of the past decade behind bars.