Syria's interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa on Thursday signed the country's constitutional declaration, which will be enforced throughout a five-year transitional period.

Sharaa said he hoped the constitutional declaration would mark the start of "a new history for Syria, where we replace oppression with justice", as he signed the document setting out the transitional period.

Israel says it has sent 10,000 packages of food aid to Syria’s Druze, as it seeks to forge ties with the minority to shape the country’s troubled transition from civil war.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the operation was conducted in recent weeks in coordination with local Druze leaders, with most of the aid delivered to the overwhelmingly Druze southern region of Sweida.

An Emirati diplomat earlier identified by Tehran as carrying a letter from U.S. President Donald Trump seeking to jump-start talks over Iran's rapidly advancing nuclear program met Wednesday with Iran's foreign minister in the Iranian capital.

It is unclear how Iran will react to the letter, which Trump revealed during a television interview last week. Its intended recipient, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said he's not interested in talks with a "bullying government."

Egypt, Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization welcomed on Thursday remarks from US President Donald Trump after he said "nobody's expelling any Palestinians" from the Gaza Strip.

It was not immediately clear whether Trump's remarks signaled backtracking from his proposed plan to take over the Palestinian territory, displacing its population to neighboring countries.

Israel on Thursday struck a building in Damascus, Syrian state media reported, with a war monitor saying the raid on an area where Palestinian leaders are known to reside killed one person.

"Israeli aircraft targeted a building with two missiles in... Damascus, killing at least one person," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said, while state news agency SANA also reported the strike.

Kuwait has released a group of American prisoners, including veterans and military contractors jailed for years on drug-related charges, in a move seen as a gesture of goodwill between two allies, a representative for the detainees told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The release follows a recent visit to the region by Adam Boehler, the Trump administration's top hostage envoy, and comes amid a continued U.S. government push to bring home American citizens jailed in foreign countries.

After Syria's longtime autocratic ruler was toppled late last year, the man who led rebel groups to victory immediately faced a new challenge: unifying the country after more than a decade of civil war.

The peril and promise of Syria under interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa — the former leader of an Islamist insurgent group — were on dramatic display over the past week. After days of deadly sectarian violence, a diplomatic triumph united a powerful force in the country's northeast with the new national army.

United Nations-backed experts on Thursday accused Israel of “the systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other gender-based violence” in its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Israel’s mission to the U.N. in Geneva rejected the allegations and accused the The Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which was created by the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council, of relying on “second-hand, single, uncorroborated sources.”

When protests over the Israel-Hamas war took root on Columbia University's campus last spring, Mahmoud Khalil became a familiar, outspoken figure in a student movement that soon spread to other U.S. colleges.

The international-affairs graduate student was a fixture in and around the protest encampment on Columbia's Manhattan campus, serving as a spokesperson and negotiator for demonstrators who deplored Israel's military campaign in Gaza and pressed the Ivy League school to cut financial ties with Israel and companies that supported the war.

Israel's defense minister warned Syria’s interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa that Israel “is watching him from the heights of Mt. Hermon,” which Israeli forces captured as part of a buffer zone inside Syria last year, and said Israel struck 40 military targets overnight in southern Syria.

Israel plans to allow members of the Druze minority from Syria to work in Israeli-controlled parts of the Golan Heights as soon as the coming week, Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement Tuesday issued from Mt. Hermon. He stressed that Israel plans to remain in the Syrian buffer zone for an “indefinite period” to ensure that southern Syria remains demilitarized and does not pose a threat to residents of Israel or the Golan Heights.