The Palestinian Authority faces a suffocating financial crisis after deep US aid cuts and an Israeli move to withhold tax transfers, sparking fears for the stability of the West Bank. 

The authority, headed by President Mahmud Abbas, announced a package of emergency measures on March 10, including halving the salaries of many civil servants.

Iraq's prime minister decreed three days of national mourning Thursday as he visited the site of a river boat accident that cost at least 77 lives in the city of Mosul.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday welcomed U.S. President Donald Trump's "historic" pledge to recognize Israel's disputed annexation of the Golan Heights, which it seized from Syria in 1967.

U.S. top diplomat Mike Pompeo became the first high-ranking American official to visit the Western Wall in annexed east Jerusalem with an Israeli prime minister on Thursday, giving another boost to Benjamin Netanyahu's re-election campaign.

President Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States should acknowledge Israeli sovereignty over the hotly-contested Golan Heights, in a major pre-election gift to his ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights," Trump said in a tweet.

Saudi women held in detention for nearly a year have been charged following contact with foreign media and activists, Human Rights Watch said Thursday, after they went on trial for undermining national security.

A group of NGOs on Thursday urged France to suspend the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia and to work for a political solution in Yemen which has been ravaged by four years of conflict.

Kurdish-led forces Thursday combed the banks of the Euphrates in eastern Syria to smoke out the last jihadists preventing the much-delayed announcement of the demise of the Islamic State's "caliphate".

Israeli authorities entered a French culture center in Jerusalem on Thursday to cancel an event, alleging it was to involve an association supported by the Palestinian Authority, a diplomatic source said.

At least 71 people died when an overcrowded ferry carrying families sank Thursday in a swollen river in northern Iraq during Kurdish New Year celebrations, officials said.

Several other people were missing after the disaster on the Tigris in the city of Mosul, according to an interior ministry official who did not want to be named.