A 13-storey residential tower in the Gaza Strip was hit by an Israeli air strike yesterday night and soon after collapsed, witnesses said, amid a surge in fighting between Israel and Gaza militants.

Syria has freed more than 400 civil servants, judges, lawyers and journalists detained this year in a crackdown on social media dissent, a move seen by rights activists and former detainees as intended to win over public opinion ahead of presidential elections.

Israel responded Hamas militant group's rocket strike on Jerusalem with airstrikes across the Gaza Strip, where 20 people, including nine children, were killed in fighting.

Israeli police firing tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-coated bullets clashed with Palestinian stone-throwers at a flashpoint Jerusalem holy site on Monday, the latest in a series of confrontations that is pushing the contested city to the brink of eruption.

A leading Iraqi anti-government activist was killed early yesterday, security sources and activists said, sending supporters of a protest movement onto the streets to demand an end to bloodshed.

Clashes erupted between Palestinian protesters and Israeli police outside the Old City of Jerusalem on Saturday as tens of thousands of Muslim worshippers prayed at the nearby Al-Aqsa Mosque on Islam’s holy night of Laylat al-Qadr.

Saudi Arabia has rejected Israel’s plans and measures to evict dozens of Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem and impose Israeli sovereignty over them, reported Al Arabiya today.

Palestinian worshippers clashed with Israeli police late Friday at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, a major holy site sacred to Muslims and Jews, in an escalation of weeks of violence in Jerusalem that has reverberated across the region.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s decision to indefinitely postpone elections could rekindle tensions between his secular Fatah movement and Hamas Islamists, piling pressure on Abbas to set a new timeline for a vote, experts said.

Iran yesterday denied media reports suggesting a prisoner swap deal had been reached with the United States, in parallel with nuclear talks involving the two arch-rivals.

A Palestinian woman was killed and two Israelis were seriously wounded in two separate shooting incidents in the occupied West Bank on Sunday, Israeli and Palestinian officials said.

A total of 179 Bangladeshi expatriates are stuck at the Muscat International Airport after Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh (Caab) added Oman to a list of 12 countries from which passengers would not be allowed to enter Bangladesh as part of the country’s Covid-19 containment measures.

At least 44 people were crushed to death at an over-crowded religious bonfire festival in Israel on Friday, medics said, in what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a "heavy disaster".

Egyptian archaeologists working on the Nile Delta have uncovered dozens of rare predynastic tombs dating to the period before Egypt’s Pharaonic kingdoms first emerged more than 5,000 years ago.

An international rights watchdog accused Israel on Tuesday of pursuing policies of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians - and against its own Arab minority - that amount to crimes against humanity.

At least 27 people were killed and 46 injured in a fire on Saturday at a hospital in south-east Baghdad that had been equipped to house Covid-19 patients, medical sources at three nearby hospitals said.

U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to formally recognize the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War One as an act of genocide, sources said on Wednesday, a move likely to infuriate Turkey and further strain already frayed ties between the two NATO allies.

Renewing passports have suddenly become a “wild goose chase” for Bangladeshi migrants in Oman.

At least 11 people were killed on Sunday when some train carriages derailed in Egypt's Qalyubia province north of Cairo, the health ministry said in a statement.

US President Joe Biden’s administration has told Congress it is proceeding with more than $23 billion in weapons sales to the United Arab Emirates, including advanced F-35 aircraft, armed drones and other equipment.