Pro-government forces fighting Huthi rebels in Yemen have taken the main hospital in the strategic Red Sea port city of Hodeida, government military officials said Saturday.

Abu Mohammed thought he could finally go home after jihadists were expelled from his Damascus suburb, but he says Syrian authorities have blocked his return by wrongly classifying his dwelling as unfit to live in.

A controversial refueling arrangement between the United States and the Saudi-led coalition that is bombing Yemen was ended on Saturday, halting a key part of Washington's involvement in the conflict.

U.S.-led coalition air strikes killed 26 civilians including 14 children Friday in a holdout of the Islamic State group in eastern Syria, a Britain-based war monitor said.

An Istanbul conference under the aegis of Nobel laureate Tawakkol Karman on Friday called for concrete measures to end the war in her native Yemen and an international court to judge those charged with crimes during the conflict.

The conference, which was organized by Karman's foundation, urged international players including the United Nations to take "deliberate and responsible actions to end the war and restore peace in Yemen."

A deadly car bomb in Iraq's Mosul, the first since the city was recaptured from jihadists, has left residents shaken and terrified that past nightmares are returning to haunt them.

The blast late on Thursday hit the popular Abu Layla restaurant in Mosul, the northern city that for three years served as the Islamic State group's Iraq headquarters.

Palestinian farmer Mahmoud Abu Shinar surveys two rows of severed olive trees -- something he says has become a sadly familiar sight.

He didn't see who took a chainsaw to them at night, but he blames residents of an Israeli settlement a few hundred meters (yards) away.

Seventeen civilians from Syria's Druze minority who had been kidnapped in July by the Islamic State group returned home safely Friday, a local media outlet reported.

State media announced on Thursday that 19 hostages had been freed following a military operation against the jihadists in the southern province of Sweida.

Palestinian civil servants formed long queues in Gaza on Friday to receive Qatari-funded salaries, as part of efforts to ease tensions in and around the impoverished territory, AFP journalists said. 

Yemeni rebels battled Friday to slow an advance by pro-government forces deeper into Hodeida seeking to recapture the city's lifeline port, launching fierce barrages of mortar fire and aiming to cut off supply routes, military sources said.