By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump said on Monday he plans to approve the sale of U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, speaking a day before he hosts Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for a day of diplomacy.

"I will say that we will be doing that," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. "We'll be selling the F-35s."

A sale would mark a significant policy shift, potentially altering the military balance in the Middle East and testing Washington's definition of maintaining Israel's "qualitative military edge."

By Howard Goller and Ali Sawafta

(Reuters) -Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday he will urgently convene cabinet ministers to ensure Israelis behind the latest attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are brought to justice.

In violence on Monday, Israelis torched homes and vehicles in Jab'a, a Palestinian village near Bethlehem after an earlier attack on property and civilians in the village of Sa’ir, the WAFA news agency said, quoting officials.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed he would deal with the violent "handful of extremists" among Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, following clashes and another attack on Monday.

Homes and vehicles in a Palestinian village were torched and vandalised on Monday evening, hours after members of the so-called Hilltop Youth movement clashed with security forces dismantling an illegal settler outpost.

Violence in the West Bank has soared since the Hamas attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war in October 2023.

(Reuters) -Iraq confirmed final election results on Monday, showing Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s list came first with 46 seats in the 329-member parliament, the election commission said.

A new government could still be months away amid wrangling to build a majority.

(Reporting by Muayad Hameed Suadi; Editing by Toby Chopra)

ANKARA (Reuters) -Turkish Defence Minister Yasar Guler said on Monday it would take at least two months to reach initial findings and analyse the black box of a Turkish cargo plane that crashed in Georgia last week and left 20 soldiers dead.

The C-130 cargo aircraft had left Azerbaijan for Turkey and crashed in Georgia, marking the NATO member's highest military death toll since 2020. Ankara has said it was investigating the cause of the crash.

LONDON (Reuters) -Britain set out plans on Monday to toughen its asylum system, with measures such as making refugee status temporary and reinterpreting human rights laws to make it easier to deport migrants who arrive illegally.

The moves are a bid to stem the rise of the populist Reform UK party, but the measures have been criticised by many charities, Labour lawmakers and supporters.

Here are details of the proposed measures:

TEMPORARY REFUGEE STATUS

(Refiles to add dropped word in headline, replace second subhead)

By Nidal al-Mughrabi, Tim Cocks and Nellie Peyton

CAIRO (Reuters) -Gazans said they paid $2,000 per seat to fly their families to South Africa on a trip arranged by a group offering a way out of the devastated enclave, in what South Africa alleged on Monday appeared to be part of a bid to displace Palestinians.

By Simon Lewis

WASHINGTON -The UN Security Council was set to vote later on Monday on a U.S.-drafted resolution endorsing President Donald Trump's peace plan for Gaza and authorizing an international stabilization force for the Palestinian enclave.

Israel and the Palestinian militantgroup Hamas agreed last month to the first phase ofTrump's 20-point plan for Gaza - aceasefire in their two-year war and a hostage-release deal - but a UN resolution is seen as vital to legitimize a transitional governance body and to reassure countries considering sending troops to Gaza.

ATHENS (Reuters) -Thousands of Greeks marched through Athens on Monday to mark the anniversary of a violently quashed student uprising in 1973 that helped topple the military junta that then ruled the country.

The annual march to the embassy of the United States, which many Greeks accuse of supporting the 1967-1974 military dictatorship, often becomes a focal point for protests against government policies.

CAIRO (Reuters) -The Palestinian Resistance Committees (PRC), an allied faction of Hamas, said on Monday that one of its local armed leaders was killed by what it described as an Israeli undercover force near Deir Al-Balah city in the central Gaza Strip.

The group said Waseem Abdel-Hadi, a commander of its armed wing, was killed in what it called a “cowardly and treacherous assassination operation".