ANKARA (Reuters) -British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is expected to discuss the pending sale of 40 Eurofighter Typhoon jets to Turkey on Monday when he meets President Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara.

The visit, Starmer's first to Turkey since taking office last year, comes as the NATO allies deepen defence cooperation, and as Ankara seeks to leverage the advanced jets to bolster its air power and make up ground on regional rivals including Israel.

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday that Washington does not view a strike that Israel said targeted a member of a Palestinian militant group in Gaza as a violation of a U.S.-backed ceasefire.

Israel said it struck a member of the Islamic Jihad group on Saturday, accusing the individual of planning to attack Israeli troops. Islamic Jihad denied it was planning an attack.

Speaking aboard President Donald Trump's plane during a trip to Asia, Rubio said: "We don’t view that as a violation of the ceasefire."

By Asif Shahzad

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) -Afghanistan and Pakistan officials will meet in Istanbul on Monday for a third day of talks after failing to clinch a lasting peace, three sources familiar with the matter said, as U.S. President Donald Trump repeated an offer to mediate.

The South Asian neighbours agreed to a ceasefire in Doha on October 19 after days of border clashes that killed dozens in the worst such violence since the Taliban seized power in Kabul in 2021.

ISTANBUL (Reuters) -A Turkish court has issued another formal arrest order for Istanbul's jailed mayor Ekrem Imamoglu on suspicion of "political espionage", state-owned Anadolu news agency said on Monday, stepping up a long-running opposition crackdown.

Imamoglu, a key rival of President Tayyip Erdogan, who has been in jail since March pending trial on separate corruption charges, received a fresh jail sentence in July for insulting and threatening the chief Istanbul prosecutor.

Imamoglu denies all charges against him.

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has said in a British newspaper interview he would not now perform in Israel, eight years after the band defied pro-Palestinian activists to play a Tel Aviv gig.

"Absolutely not. I wouldn't want to be 5,000 miles anywhere near the Netanyahu regime," he told The Sunday Times Magazine, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government.

The interview with members of the British band -- whose UK number one albums include "OK Computer" and "Kid A" -- took place before this month's ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.

Securing the release of the jailed founder of the Kurdish militant group PKK is needed for the success of the emerging peace process with Turkey, one of the group's senior leaders told AFP.

Abdullah Ocalan's "freedom is crucial for this process to advance with greater effectiveness," Devrim Palu told AFP in an interview in northern Iraq on Sunday as the PKK began withdrawing all of its fighters from Turkey.

Ocalan, who founded the PKK in 1978, is the embodiment of the Kurdish rebellion against Turkey which lasted more four decades and cost some 50,000 lives.

(Reuters) -Red Cross and Egyptian teams have been permitted to search for the bodies of deceased hostages beyond the "yellow line" demarcating the Israeli military's pullback in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli government spokesperson said on Sunday.

(Reporting by Steven Scheer; Editing by Aidan Lewis)

Israel insisted on Sunday that it will maintain control of security inside Gaza despite signing up to a US-brokered ceasefire that foresees the deployment of an international security force.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told ministers Israel would decide for itself where and when to strike its foes and which countries would be allowed to send troops to police the truce.

(Reuters) -Austria's Chancellor Christian Stocker has firmly rejected any suggestion of banning Israel from the Eurovision Song Contest as his country prepares to host the next edition of the competition in 2026.

"I would consider it a fatal mistake to exclude Israel," Stocker was quoted as saying in an interview with German news agency dpa published on Sunday, Austria's National Day.

"Based on our history alone, I would never be in favour of that," he added, in reference to Austria's shared responsibility for crimes committed during the Holocaust in World War Two.

With no shoes to protect their tiny dust-covered feet, Hiam Muqdad's grandchildren toddled unfazed through the bombed-out ruins of their Gaza City neighbourhood in search of clean water.

Clutching large black buckets and their grandmother's hand, the infant trio seemed not to notice the scars left by two years of war, barely registering the enormous piles of rubble, warped metal and toppled buildings lining their path.

Muqdad, 62, told AFP she went out every morning with the children to search for water, sometimes finding enough for a few days and sometimes not at all.