Near a sprawling tent city outside Mecca, Saudi hospital staff are preparing for a flood of heat-related cases as Muslim pilgrims begin hajj this week in sweltering summer temperatures.

The Mina Emergency Hospital is one of 15 such facilities operating just a few weeks a year around the annual pilgrimage to Islam's holiest sites, which in 2024 saw more than 1,300 people die in the desert heat.

Saudi authorities hope to head off a fatal repeat of last year's pilgrimage, when temperatures reached 51.8 degrees Celsius (125 Fahrenheit).

Twenty-seven people were killed in southern Gaza on Tuesday as Israeli troops opened fire near a US-backed aid centre, with the military saying the incident was under investigation.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres decried the deaths of Palestinians seeking food aid as "unacceptable", and the world body's rights chief condemned attacks on civilians as "a war crime" following a similar shooting near the same site on Sunday.

In the heart of Cairo, a small cinema has for over a decade offered a unique space for independent film in a country whose industry is largely dominated by commercial considerations.

Zawya, meaning "perspective" in Arabic, has weathered the storm of Egypt's economic upheavals, championing a more artistic approach from the historical heart of the country's golden age of cinema.

Zawya was born in the post-revolutionary artistic fervour of the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime president Hosni Mubarak.

On Beirut's chaotic, car-choked streets, Lebanese student Fatima Fakih rides a shiny purple bus to university, one of a fleet rolled out by authorities to revive public transport in a country struggling to deliver basic services.

The 19-year-old says the spacious public buses are "safer, better and more comfortable", than the informal network of private buses and minivans that have long substituted for mass transport.

Syria's interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa has in six months established himself internationally and had crippling sanctions removed, but still needs to rebuild national institutions, revive the economy and unite the fractured country.

AFP looks at the main challenges facing Sharaa, whose Islamist-led coalition toppled longtime Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad on December 8.

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Cries of grief echoed across southern Gaza's Nasser Hospital Monday as dozens came to mourn Hossam Wafi, after the father of six was killed while attempting to get supplies to feed his family.

His mother, Nahla Wafi, sobbed uncontrollably over her son, who was among 31 people killed by Israeli fire while trying to reach a food distribution site the previous day, according to the Palestinian territory's civil defence agency.

"He went to get food for his daughters -- and came back dead," said Nahla Wafi who lost a son and had relatives injured on Sunday.

Israeli forces on Monday blocked an international media tour in the occupied West Bank, preventing journalists from entering the village of Oscar-winning Palestinian director Basel Adra who decried worsening Israeli violence.

Adra's film "No Other Land" chronicles the forced displacement of Palestinians by Israeli troops and settlers in Masafer Yatta, an area in the southern West Bank that Israel declared a restricted military zone in the 1980s.

French prosecutors were on Monday probing a terror motive after a man who had posted racist videos shot dead his Tunisian neighbour and badly wounded a Turkish man in the south of France.

The shooting late on Saturday in Puget-sur-Argens, in the southern region of Var, came after a Malian man was stabbed to death in April in a mosque, also in southern France, as concern grows over hate crimes against Muslims.

The shooting was initially investigated by regional prosecutors as a suspected murder motivated by the victim's ethnicity or religion.

UN chief Antonio Guterres called Monday for an independent investigation into the killing and wounding of scores of Palestinians near a US-backed aid centre in Gaza the day before.

Gaza's civil defence agency said Israeli gunfire killed at least 31 people and wounded 176 near the aid distribution site in the southern city of Rafah on Sunday, with medics at nearby hospitals also reporting a deluge of gunshot wound victims.

The Israeli military denied firing at people "while they were near or within" the site.

US President Donald Trump on Monday ruled out allowing Iran to enrich uranium under any nuclear deal between the foes -- as Tehran defended what it said was its "peaceful" pursuit of fuel for power generation.

Uranium enrichment has remained a key point of contention in five rounds of talks since April to ink a new accord to replace the deal with major powers that Trump abandoned during his first term in 2018.