UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Friday spoke to Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, urging him to release a British citizen and activist jailed in Cairo, Downing Street said.

"The prime minister discussed the case of British national Alaa Abd El-Fattah with President Sisi. He pressed for Alaa's release, having met his mother Laila Soueif in recent weeks," Downing Street said in a readout of the pair's telephone call.

US President Donald Trump's idea to rebuild the Gaza Strip as a swanky riviera is unacceptable unless it is for Gazans themselves to live in, a Palestinian minister said on Friday.

"It's very good to rebuild Gaza as a riviera -- but with its people in it," said Palestinian minister of state for foreign affairs Varsen Aghabekian.

Trump's vision for Gaza involves the United States taking over the occupied Palestinian territory, resettling its Palestinian inhabitants elsewhere and transforming the war-ravaged strip into a riviera for "world people".

For Muslims in Saudi Arabia and most Sunni-ruled Middle Eastern states Ramadan will begin on Saturday, but in Shiite-majority Iran and Iraq it will start the following day, authorities announced.

The holy month, during which hundreds of millions of faithful around the world observe a daytime fast, traditionally begins with the sighting of the crescent moon.

Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's two holiest sites, was joined by its Gulf Arab neighbours in declaring that the moon had been sighted on Friday.

Eli Sharabi, who was held hostage in Gaza for more than 490 days, has recounted his suffering in captivity in a televised interview, an extract of which was posted on social media by Israel's foreign ministry Friday.

"For a year and four months my legs were shackled with chains with very, very heavy locks that cut into your flesh," Sharabi said in the interview broadcast late Thursday on Israel's Channel 12.

He spoke of intense hunger, food deprivation and the days when the only thing to eat was "this quarter of a pita that you can finish in three bites".

Thousands lined the streets around the Israeli commericial hub Tel Aviv on Friday for the funeral procession of Tsachi Idan, a hostage killed in captivity in Gaza.

The development engineer was abducted from his kibbutz of Nahal Oz during Hamas's unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

He was taken to Gaza with his hands covered in the blood of his 18-year-old daughter Maayan Idan, who had been shot dead in front of him as the family hid in a safe room.

Jailed Kurdish militant leader Abdullah Ocalan's call to disarm sparked relief but also fears for the future among Kurds in Syria and Iraq, who long for peace after fighting hard for autonomy.

In a potentially seismic shift in Kurdish history, veteran leader Ocalan sent a message this week from his Turkish prison, calling on his Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) to dissolve and disarm.

But the PKK, mostly based in the mountains of northern Iraq, has yet to respond, and its members have not seen their leader for decades except for a few photos from his jail cell.

Watching her granddaughter sleep in cramped quarters for displaced Palestinians, Sanaa Shraim hopes for a better life for the baby, born into a weeks-long Israeli military raid in the occupied West Bank.

Israeli forces searching for suspected militants have long carried out limited incursions into Jenin refugee camp, where Shraim and about 24,000 other Palestinians normally live.

But with no end in sight to the ongoing military operation across the northern West Bank, "I worry about what will happen, when the children grow up in this reality of constant raids," said Shraim.

Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof's "The Seed of the Sacred Fig" won a special prize at the Cannes film festival last year and is hoping to go one better at the Oscars on Sunday.

But the powerful drama, set during the "Woman, Life, Freedom" wave of protests and nominated for best international film in the 97th Academy Awards, will not be presented as an Iranian film.

In Kibbutz Nirim, hard by the Gaza border, the sound of hammers cuts through the silence that has settled on this small Israeli farming community since a ceasefire took effect on January 19.

Hamas's 2023 attack tore through the community of around 400 people, just two kilometres (little more than a mile) from the border but, 16 months later, Nirim is rebuilding now that the bombs have subsided.

"It's so important that we make it beautiful again," said Adele Raemer, an Israeli-American who has lived in the kibbutz for 49 years.

Relations between France and Algeria have hit a new low with Algiers blaming the rise of the French far right for a more combative approach from Paris towards its former colony.

Algeria has "clearly become the battleground for internal French political disputes, where no blow is too low," the foreign ministry said in a sharply worded statement.

It pointed to the French far right as the "instigator" of the deepening rift and accused it of "taking French-Algerian relations hostage".