Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to launch a new military operation in Syria to secure Turkey's southern border.

Speaking following a Cabinet meeting, Erdogan said the aim of the operation would be resume Turkish efforts to create a 30-kilometer (20 mile) safe zone along its border with Syria.

A sandstorm blanketed parts of the Middle East on Monday, including Iraq, Syria and Iran, sending people to hospitals and disrupting flights in some places.

It was the latest in a series of unprecedented nearly back-to-back sandstorms this year that have bewildered residents and raised alarm among experts and officials, who blame climate change and poor governmental regulations.

Almost two weeks after the death of the veteran Palestinian-American reporter for Al Jazeera, a reconstruction by The Associated Press lends support to assertions from both Palestinian authorities and Abu Akleh's colleagues that the bullet that cut her down came from an Israeli gun.

Any conclusive answer is likely to prove elusive because of the severe distrust between the two sides, each of which is in sole possession of potentially crucial evidence.

The ruler of Qatar called out Monday double standards in the West while evoking the killing of a Palestinian-American journalist during an Israeli raid this month.

Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani said during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that “we should not accept a world where governments have double standards about the value of people based on their region, race or religion."

An Arab Israeli lawmaker who quit the ruling coalition said Sunday that she was returning to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's 60-member alliance, ending a crisis that lasted just a few days.

Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi said Thursday that she was quitting Bennett's coalition, leaving it with with just 59 members in Israel's 120-seat parliament. She cited the government's hardline policies in Jerusalem and West Bank settlement construction that she said have alienated her constituents, fellow Palestinian citizens of Israel.

A homicide investigation was opened on Monday after a security guard at the Qatari Embassy in Paris was killed and a suspect arrested, the prosecutor's office said.

The circumstances of the killing, including the method used, were not immediately clear. The prosecutor's office said that "the use of a weapon is not at this time confirmed."

Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi arrived in Oman on Monday with trade deals on the agenda and as international talks on Tehran's nuclear program hang in the balance.

Raisi, on his second Gulf visit since taking office in August, was greeted by Sultan Haitham bin Tareq at the airport and received a 21-gun salute at the royal palace, an Omani statement said.

Iraq closed airports and public buildings on Monday as another sandstorm -- the ninth since mid-April -- hit the country, authorities said.  

The capital Baghdad was enveloped in a giant dust cloud that left usually traffic-choked streets largely deserted, an AFP correspondent said. 

Six Palestinians have been sentenced to an additional five years in jail for a 2021 escape through a tunnel from a prison in northern Israel, their lawyers told Israeli media. 

The six, already serving life terms for anti-Israeli attacks, escaped on September 6 last year from Gilbao prison through a tunnel dug under a sink.

Israeli surface-to-surface missiles killed three people near the Syrian capital Damascus on Friday, state media said quoting a military source.