Jihadists killed at least 11 soldiers in northwestern Syria Saturday when they detonated explosives placed in tunnels dug underneath army positions before attacking them, a monitor said.

Rare protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government show no sign of abating with demonstrations reported in a string of towns in Daraa and Sweida provinces.

Israel's far-right national security minister lashed out at supermodel Bella Hadid on Friday for criticizing his recent fiery televised remarks about Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

In an interview earlier this week with Israel's Channel 12 following two deadly Palestinian attacks against Israelis in the occupied territory, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir argued that his right to freedom of movement as a Jewish settler outweighs the same right for Palestinians.

French investigative magistrates on Friday ordered former president Nicolas Sarkozy and 12 others to go on trial on charges that his 2007 presidential campaign received millions in illegal financing from the government of late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

The national financial prosecutor, Jean-François Bohnert, announced that the decade-long investigation has been formally closed. The trial will run from January to April 2025, the statement said.

The Danish government on Friday said it will propose a law that would make it illegal to desecrate any holy book in Denmark, where a recent string of public desecrations of the Quran by a handful of anti-Islam activists has sparked angry demonstrations in Muslim countries.

Denmark has been viewed as a country that facilitates insult and denigration of the cultures, religions, and traditions of other countries, the government said.

The Dutch Supreme Court on Friday upheld a ruling that a Palestinian man cannot sue Israel's former defense minister and another former senior military officer over their roles in a deadly 2014 Gaza airstrike.

The Highest Dutch court confirmed findings by judges in two lower courts that Benny Gantz and former Air Force Commander Amir Eshel are protected from civil proceedings in the Netherlands because they have "functional immunity."

An explosion ripped through a Hamas militant site in the central Gaza Strip on Thursday, Palestinian authorities said, killing one militant and seriously wounding another.

The Gaza-based interior ministry did not reveal the cause of the blast but said it killed Ashraf Hussein, a member of Hamas' military wing, the Qassam Brigades. The Qassam Brigades acknowledged that Hussein was killed in what the group described as an accidental explosion.

The Palestinian hamlet of al-Qabun in the central occupied West Bank was silent this week — the grazing fields for sheep deserted, the empty schoolhouse locked, the makeshift homes left as steel carcasses.

The last families living there packed up two weeks ago, driven from their homes of nearly three decades by what they said was a year of intensified attacks and harassment by armed Jewish settlers living in unauthorized outposts on neighboring hilltops.

An avalanche of rocks tumbled down a hillside in Israel near the Dead Sea on Thursday, Israeli medics said, injuring at least seven people, including children.

Israel's rescue service said the victims ranged from 4 to 40 years old, including a 5-year-old boy in critical condition. A 4-year-old girl was in moderate condition and others were less seriously injured after layers of mud and rocks slammed into the hiking trail.

Three members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) were killed Thursday in a Turkish drone strike in Iraq's Kurdistan region, authorities said, as Ankara's top diplomat visited the northern region.

"A Turkish army drone struck a PKK vehicle, killing an official and two fighters" of the group -- considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey and Western countries -- in the Sidakan district, the Kurdish counter-terrorism services said.