Russian fighter jets flew dangerously close to several U.S. drone aircraft over Syria on Wednesday, setting off flares and forcing the MQ-9 Reapers to take evasive maneuvers, the Air Force said.

U.S. Air Forces Central released a video of the encounter, showing a Russian SU-35 fighter closing in on a Reaper, and later showed a number of the so-called parachute flares moving into the drone's flight path. The flares are attached to parachutes.

It's been 16 years since the borders of the Gaza Strip slammed shut after Hamas militants seized control of the territory.

The takeover forced the European Union to withdraw monitors who had been deployed at a Gaza border crossing to help the Palestinians prepare for independence. Yet the EU has regularly renewed funding for the unit since then, most recently late last month.

As Israeli forces pulled out of Jenin, its Palestinian residents came back to assess the devastation: trashed homes, charred cars and roads strewn with rubble, glass and bullet casings.

The West Bank city and militant stronghold has endured violence before, but the latest offensive was the heaviest in years, with air strikes hitting buildings and armored bulldozers ripping up streets.

The U.N. secretary general is hoping that the Security Council will vote later this month to keep a key border crossing from Turkey to Syria's rebel-held northwest open for critical aid deliveries for a period of one year instead of six months, a U.N. official said.

Syria's northwestern province of Idlib is home to some 4 million people, many of whom were earlier displaced during the 12-year civil war, which has killed nearly half a million people. Hundreds of thousands live in tent settlements and rely on aid that comes through the Bab al-Hawa border crossing.

Jordan's Attarat power plant was envisioned as a landmark project promising to provide the desert kingdom with a major source of energy while solidifying its relations with China.

But weeks after its official opening, the site, a sea of black, crumbly rock in the barren desert south of Jordan's capital, is instead a source of heated controversy. Deals surrounding the plant put Jordan on the hook for billions of dollars in debt to China — all for a plant that is no longer needed for its energy, because of other agreements made since the project's conception.

Israel carried out air strikes on the Gaza Strip on Wednesday in response to rockets fired from the Palestinian coastal enclave, the army said.

"In response to the rockets launched earlier tonight (Wednesday), the IDF (Israel Defense Force) is currently striking in the Gaza Strip," the army said, which a Palestinian security source said had hit a Hamas military site in northern Gaza but caused no injuries.

Israel's army Wednesday declared the end of a large-scale military operation in the occupied West Bank that killed 12 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier over the previous two days.

The raid, involving hundreds of forces, drone strikes and armored bulldozers, targeted the northern West Bank city of Jenin, a center for multiple armed Palestinian groups.

Saudi Arabia has said it enjoys "full rights" along with Kuwait to a disputed gas field in the resource-rich Gulf, pushing back against claims by Iran, state media reported late Tuesday.

The field, known as Arash in Iran and Dorra in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, falls under "joint ownership between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the State of Kuwait, and they alone have full rights", the official Saudi Press Agency reported, citing a foreign ministry source.

A suspected car ramming and stabbing attack in Tel Aviv injured seven people Tuesday before the suspect was "neutralized", police and medics said, on the second day of a major Israeli army operation in the occupied West Bank.

Police said they received a report about "a car that attacked a number of civilians" in north Tel Aviv and that the "terrorist has been neutralized".

Egypt and Turkey said Tuesday they had appointed ambassadors to each others' countries for the first time in a decade, in the latest sign of warming ties.

Cairo and Ankara both issued statements announcing "the upgrading of diplomatic relations between them to the level of ambassadors".