Iran executed at least 975 people last year in a "horrifying escalation" of its use of capital punishment, two human rights groups said on Thursday.

Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and French group Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) said the figure was the highest since IHR began recording executions in Iran in 2008.

The figure "reveals a horrifying escalation in the use of the death penalty by the Islamic republic in 2024," they said in a joint report, accusing Iran of using the death penalty as a "central tool of political oppression".

Israel said Friday that one of the bodies returned from Gaza is not that of Shiri Bibas, as claimed by Hamas, and accused Palestinian "terrorists" of killing her two boys who have become symbols of the hostages' ordeal.

Thousands of mourning Israelis had observed a moment of silence Thursday in honour of four dead hostages returned by Hamas, the first handover of bodies under the fragile ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas said the remains included those of Bibas and her two young sons, whose father was released by the militant group this month.

Lebanon's Hezbollah is preparing for a massive turnout for the funeral on Sunday of its slain leader Hassan Nasrallah, an opportunity for a show of strength by the Iran-backed group after a bruising war with Israel.

Nasrallah's death nearly five months ago in a huge Israeli strike on Beirut's southern suburbs left Hezbollah supporters in disbelief and sent shockwaves across Lebanon and the region.

The country will stop for Sunday's funeral, to be held at 1:00 pm (1100 GMT) at the Camille Chamoun sports stadium on the capital's outskirts.

Prominent Tunisian human rights activist Sihem Bensedrine was released from jail on Wednesday after an appeals court ruling, AFP journalists said, although she remains barred from leaving the country.

A court spokesman earlier said Bensedrine cannot leave Tunisia as she still faces charges in other cases.

"I can only be happy, as no one wants to be in this hole," she said upon her release on Wednesday evening from Manouba prison in the suburbs of the capital.

Syria's tiny Jewish community said they held their first group prayer in decades Wednesday, in a synagogue in Damascus's Old City, expressing joy at the long-awaited return to public worship.

In the Faranj synagogue, Syrian-American Rabbi Yusuf Hamra led the prayer for the first time since arriving this week from the United States, where he has lived since the 1990s.

"The last time I visited the synagogue here and prayed was before I travelled to America," said Hamra, 77.

Egypt's antiquities authority says it has found the ancient tomb of King Thutmose II, the first royal burial to be located since the famed discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922.

The tomb, discovered near the Valley of the Kings in Luxor in southern Egypt, belonged to King Thutmose II of the 18th dynasty, who lived nearly 3,500 years ago.

Thutmose II was an ancestor to Tutankhamun himself, and his half-sister and queen consort was Pharaoh Hatshepsut.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Wednesday rejected a controversial proposal by US President Donald Trump to displace Palestinians from the war-devastated Gaza Strip.

The Arab League is scheduled to hold an extraordinary meeting in Cairo on March 4 in response to Trump's plan to take over Gaza and permanently move its Palestinian inhabitants elsewhere, including to Egypt and Jordan, and then redevelop the coastal territory into the "Riviera of the Middle East".

An Israeli group campaigning for the release of hostages described the deaths of three members of the Bibas family as "heart-shattering" Wednesday as Hamas prepared to hand over their bodies.

"We received the heart-shattering news that Shiri Bibas, her children Ariel and Kfir, and Oded Lifshitz are no longer with us," the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement.

Yarden Bibas, the boys' father and Shiri's husband, was abducted separately on October 7, 2023 and was released from the Gaza Strip in a previous hostage-prisoner exchange on February 1.

World number one Aryna Sabalenka slumped to a 6-3, 6-2 loss against Denmark's Clara Tauson in the last 16 of the Dubai Championships on Wednesday, as Jasmine Paolini's title defence came to a painful end.

Sabalenka, who beat the 38th-ranked Tauson on her way to last month's Australian Open final, suffered a second straight premature exit after losing in her opening match in Qatar a week ago.

The haunting image of Shiri Bibas clutching her sons on October 7 was once again splashed across the front pages of Israeli newspapers Wednesday, as a collective sense of anguish set in after Hamas said it would return their bodies.

Footage of their abduction, filmed and broadcast by Hamas militants during their unprecedented 2023 attack on Israel, showed the 34-year-old mother and her sons Ariel, then four, and Kfir, just nine months old, being seized from their home near the Gaza border.