US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Israel, the West Bank, Morocco and Algeria over March 26-30 to discuss the Ukraine war, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Iran, the State Department announced Thursday.

Blinken will meet separately with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, and while in Morocco will meet the UAE's de facto ruler, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.

French anti-terror prosecutors have opened a preliminary inquiry into torture and acts of barbarism allegedly committed by Emirati General Ahmed Nasser Al-Raisi who in November became president of Interpol, judicial sources said on Thursday.

The probe follows a legal complaint by an NGO which accused Raisi of being responsible for the torture of an opposition figure in his role as high-ranking official at the United Arab Emirates interior ministry.

When Yarema Dukh set up Ukraine's official Twitter account in 2016, he knew that social media was the best way for his country to get its message out.

"We never had the means like the Russians to found multinational media like RT or Sputnik," the former government communications adviser told AFP over the phone from Kyiv.

Since Russia's full invasion last month, the Kyiv government has used social media to highlight atrocities, issue messages of defiance and even share a joke or two.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Israel, the West Bank, Morocco and Algeria over March 26-30 to discuss the Ukraine war, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Iran, the State Department announced Thursday.

Blinken will meet separately with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on the first stage of the trip, and while in Morocco he will meet the UAE's de facto ruler, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.

The ruler of Dubai abused his ex-wife on an extraordinary scale, a UK judge ruled on Thursday, ending a lengthy legal battle between the couple over their two children.

The abuse by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, 72, of Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, 47, was "conducted on a scale which is entirely outside the ordinary circumstances of cases heard in the family court in this jurisdiction", judge Andrew McFarlane said.

Russia's war on Ukraine has drawn unprecedented sanctions that have seen it banned from most international sports in a Western-led break with the long-standing convention against politics mixing with sport.

For many Arabs, who have seen their own sportsmen and women punished for refusing to compete with Israelis in protest at successive wars, the exception made for a European conflict smacks of double standards.

Egyptian squash champion Ali Farag said "nobody should be happy about what's going (on in Ukraine)".

Egypt will apply for a new loan from the IMF, the Washington-based crisis lender announced Wednesday, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine caused inflation to spike in the Middle Eastern nation.

"The rapidly changing global environment and spillovers related to the war in Ukraine are posing important challenges for countries around the world, including Egypt," the lender's mission chief in Egypt Celine Allard said in a statement.

A senior army officer was among five Yemeni soldiers killed on Wednesday in a bomb attack near the southern city of Aden, officials said.

"Major General Thabet Jawas and four soldiers were killed in a car bomb explosion" as they travelled through the village of Al-Madina al-Khadra, 10 kilometres (six miles) north of Aden, a security official told AFP.

A local official confirmed the attack and the death toll.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

The Syrian Kurdish forces that spearheaded the battle to crush the Islamic State group's self-proclaimed "caliphate" in 2019 warned Wednesday that the world's lack of support risked allowing for a jihadist rebirth.

The IS proto-state -- which once administered millions of people across swathes of Syria and Iraq, on territory roughly the size of Britain -- was declared defeated on March 23, 2019.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Viktoria Saidam knew she needed to find a "safer place" than Kyiv and ultimately chose her husband's homeland -- a Palestinian territory not typically associated with security: Gaza.

Saidam, 21, was born Viktoria Breij in Vinnytsia, a town some 200 kilometres (125 miles) southwest of Ukraine's capital.

While studying pharmacy in Kyiv, she met Ibrahim Saidam, a medical student from Bureij, a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli-blockaded Mediterranean enclave home to 2.3 million Palestinians.