A helicopter crashed off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, with two pilots now missing, authorities said Friday.

The crash happened offshore, though the UAE's General Civil Aviation Authorities did not specify where. It identified the aircraft involved as a Bell 212, which can carry 14 passengers and a pilot.

Israel closed the main commercial crossing in the Gaza Strip, effectively banning exports from the coastal territory after saying it had uncovered explosives in a shipment of clothes to the occupied West Bank. Gaza's fishermen, with their perishable exports, were among the first to feel the pain.

The new restrictions choke off the territory's already ailing economy. They come on top of the punishing 16-year blockade that Israel and Egypt have maintained since the Islamic militant group Hamas seized control of the enclave in 2007.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has stripped Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas of the French capital's highest honor after he made remarks about the Holocaust that echoed anti-Semitic tropes, her office said on Friday.

Abbas could no longer hold the Grand Vermeil medal after he "justified the extermination of the Jews of Europe" in World War II, her office told AFP.

The United States, Germany and the European Union have condemned recent comments about the Holocaust by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, accusing him of distorting history and promoting antisemitic stereotypes.

In a speech last month to senior members of his Fatah movement, Abbas said that Adolf Hitler killed European Jews not because of antisemitism, but because of their "social functions" in society, such as money lending.

Australian Transport Minister Catherine King said on Thursday that invasive gynecological examinations conducted on passengers at Doha's international airport in 2020 were part of the reason she refused to allow Qatar Airways to double its services to Australia.

King has faced intense questioning over why she decided on June 10 not to allow the airline to double its current 28 flights per week to Australia.

Sudan's army chief traveled to Qatar on Thursday for talks with the country's emir, making his third international trip since fighting broke out between the military and a rival paramilitary force in April, Sudanese state media said.

Sudan plunged into chaos almost five months ago when long-simmering tensions between the military, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, escalated into open warfare on April 15.

A daughter of a long-detained human rights activist in Bahrain said Thursday she would return to the island nation to press for his release while he and hundreds of other inmates are on a major hunger strike and even though she could be imprisoned as well.

The trip by Maryam al-Khawaja draws renewed attention to the plight of her 62-year-old ailing father, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a dual Danish-Bahraini national convicted of internationally criticized terrorism charges and held in what a United Nations panel calls an "arbitrary" imprisonment ever since.

A Palestinian youth has stabbed two people, moderately wounding one of them, in an attack outside a main entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem, authorities said.

Israeli police said the teen carried out the attack near Jaffa Gate after getting off a bus. The suspect, a 17-year-old Palestinian from east Jerusalem, was caught and arrested after a short chase. His name was not immediately released.

Morocco's senate president has postponed a historic visit to Israel due to a medical emergency, the Israeli parliament announced.

The announcement came just a day before Enaam Mayara was scheduled to visit Israel's Knesset, or parliament, on a trip aimed at cementing the fledgling ties between the two countries.

A former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank, joining a tiny but growing list of retired officials to endorse an idea that remains largely on the fringes of Israeli discourse and international diplomacy.

Tamir Pardo becomes the latest former senior official to have concluded that Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank amounts to apartheid, a reference to the system of racial separation in South Africa that ended in 1994.