Following the fatal shooting of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh during a raid in the occupied West Bank, AFP has looked at the Israeli army's record of probing previous journalist deaths.

The Qatar-based TV channel alleged that Palestinian-American Abu Akleh, 51, who was wearing a blue flak vest marked "Press", was killed deliberately by an Israeli soldier on May 11.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said an initial investigation had not determined whether she was killed by stray Palestinian gunfire or an Israeli bullet aimed at a militant.

Thousands attended the funeral Tuesday of an Iranian Revolutionary Guards colonel who was shot dead in Tehran in what authorities have dubbed an "assassination" by agents of the United States and its allies.

Colonel Sayyad Khodai was killed on Sunday by a gunman on the back of a motorcycle as he sat in his car outside his home.

President Ebrahim Raisi vowed on Monday to avenge the killing -- the most high profile inside Iran since that of top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November 2020.

Iran had accused Israel of masterminding that attack.

Samira hears the same message from Turkish politicians on the television day and night: Syrian refugees like her must return home. But her home near Damascus is still not safe, she says.

The 44-year-old from Ghouta is one of the hundreds of thousands of refugees in Turkey's Sanliurfa province, which shares a long border with Syria.

Civil war in Samira's homeland is estimated to have killed nearly half a million people and displaced millions since it began with a brutal crackdown of anti-government protests in 2011.

The famed river bridges of the Iranian city of Isfahan are a beloved tourist draw -- but much of the time their stone arches span just sand and rocks, not water.

Drought and upstream water diversions have seen the Zayandeh Rood, "fertile river" in Persian, run dry since 2000, with only rare exceptions.

Sitting on a quay with two friends, 60-year-old Jalal Mirahmadi gazed with melancholy at the riverbed, which became the site of a farmers' protest late last year.

Lebanese law student Charbel Chaaya spent the election campaign distributing flyers in Beirut and trying to convince his parents to vote for independents to shake the grip of established parties.

The 21-year-old activist is one of many young voters who went against their parents' political views, and helped propel at least 13 independents to parliament last week for the first time in decades.

"My parents think I'm too idealistic, that this country will never change," he said, adding that his father voted for a traditional Christian party, the Lebanese Forces.

British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe said in an interview on Monday that she was forced to sign a last-minute false confession before she was freed after six years' imprisonment in Tehran.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, returned home in March along with a fellow dual national, after Britain agreed to pay a longstanding debt to Iran.

She was imprisoned for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Iranian government and for propaganda against Iran, charges she has always denied.

Israel's army said Monday that if an Israeli soldier fired the bullet that killed Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, it did not appear that the soldier was guilty of criminal misconduct.

"Given that Ms Abu Akleh was killed in the midst of an active combat zone, there can be no immediate suspicion of criminal activity absent further evidence," it said in a statement citing Military Advocate Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi.

An Iranian director, who unsettled Cannes with a film about a serial killer "cleansing" the holy city of Mashhad of prostitutes, on Monday criticised the way women are represented in Iranian films.

Ali Abbasi, whose film "Holy Spider" is in the race for the Palme d'Or at the French Riviera film fest, said any serious movie that manages to get made in the Islamic Republic "is a miracle".

But the country's film-makers "have been presenting a parallel reality of Iran in the past 50 years", he told reporters.

Iraq closed public buildings and temporarily shut airports Monday as another sandstorm -- the ninth since mid-April -- hit the country.

More than 1,000 people were hospitalised across the nation with respiratory problems, health ministry spokesman Seif al-Badr told AFP.

Flights were also grounded in neighbouring Kuwait for a second time this month, as the region grapples with the increasingly frequent weather phenomenon.

Tunisia's powerful UGTT trade union confederation said Monday it would not take part in a national dialogue proposed by President Kais Saied, arguing that it excludes key actors and civil society.

Saied sacked the government last July before dissolving parliament and seizing control of the judiciary, in moves opponents called a coup against the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring uprisings.

The president has excluded political parties from any dialogue, despite domestic and overseas calls for a more inclusive process.