Dec 4 (Reuters) - The U.S. plans to expand the number of countries covered by its travel ban to more than 30, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Thursday.

Noem, in an interview on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle," was asked to confirm whether the administration of President Donald Trump would be increasing the number of countries on the travel ban list to 32.

"I won't be specific on the number, but it's over 30, and the president is continuing to evaluate countries," she said.

As relentless harassment from Israeli settlers drove his brothers from their Bedouin community in the central occupied West Bank, Ahmed Kaabneh remained determined to stay on the land his family had lived on for generations.

But when a handful of young settlers constructed a shack around 100 metres above his home and started intimidating his children, 45-year-old Kaabneh said he had no choice but to flee too.

As with scores of Bedouin communities across the West Bank, the small cluster of wood and metal houses where Kaabneh's father and grandfather had lived now lies empty.

By Nate Raymond

BOSTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday said she was "struggling" to understand why President Donald Trump's administration is preventing a Tufts University PhD student who had engaged in pro-Palestinian activism from working on campus nearly seven months after the Turkish citizen was released from an immigration detention center.

By Trevor Hunnicutt

WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump gathered the leaders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda to sign a peace deal in Washington on Thursday even as fighting continued in their war-scarred region.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Democratic Republic of Congo President Felix Tshisekedi affirmed commitments to an economic integration compact agreed last month, and to a U.S.-brokered peace deal reached in June. They were also due to sign an agreement on critical minerals.

With US President Donald Trump and other sceptics calling climate change a hoax, the UN's climate science body must tell the world in a "very clear way" that humans are heating the planet, its chairman told AFP.

Jim Skea, a Scottish professor, chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which held a five-day meeting in a skyscraper outside Paris this week to begin drafting the next major UN climate assessment.

Negotiations on the next stage of the Gaza ceasefire continue without significant progress at a moment when the truce appears particularly fragile.

The United States, alongside Qatar and Egypt, secured a truce in Gaza that came into effect on October 10 and has mostly halted two years of war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas.

The United Nations has since endorsed President Donald Trump's peace plan, yet there has been little progress over issues of reconstruction and post-war governance. AFP explains what could happen next:

- What is the plan? -

Dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has said he plans to return to Iran despite being sentenced to a year in prison and a travel ban earlier this week, a report said Thursday.

The 65-year-old is currently touring to promote his latest Oscar-nominated film "It Was Just an Accident", which won top prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

"Although I was given the opportunity, even in the hardest years, I never considered leaving my country and being a refugee elsewhere," Panahi told an audience at the Marrakech Film Festival, according to Variety magazine.

NEW YORK, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Syria's economy is growing much faster than the World Bank's 1% estimate for 2025, due to the flow of refugees back to the country after a 14-year civil war ended, aiding plans for the country to relaunch its currency, Syrian central bank governor AbdulKader Husrieh told Reuters NEXT on Thursday.

Husrieh also said he welcomed a deal with Visa to establish digital payment systems and added that the country is working with the International Monetary Fund to develop methods to accurately measure economic data.

By Maayan Lubell and Nidal al-Mughrabi

JERUSALEM/CAIRO Dec 4 (Reuters) - The head of an armed Palestinian faction that opposes Hamas in Gaza has been killed, Israeli media reported on Thursday, in what would be a blow to Israeli efforts to support Gazan clans against the Islamist movement.

Yasser Abu Shabab, a Bedouin tribal leader based in Israeli-held Rafah in southern Gaza, has led the most prominent of several small anti-Hamas groups that emerged in Gaza during the war that began more than two years ago.

ANKARA, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Turkey summoned Ukraine's ambassador and Russia's acting charges d'affaires to the foreign ministry to convey its concerns over a series of attacks on Russia-linked vessels inside its exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea, Deputy Foreign Minister Berris Ekinci said on Thursday.

"We are witnessing a very serious escalation in recent weeks in the Russia-Ukraine war with reciprocal attacks. And lastly, there were certain attacks in the Black Sea within our exclusive economic zone as well," Ekinci told parliament's foreign affairs commission.