U.N.-hosted talks between the warring sides in Libya that were supposed to start on Wednesday were clouded in uncertainty after participants said they were staying away.

Local authorities in embattled northwestern Syria on Wednesday suspended school in Idlib city and surrounding areas a day after reported strikes on educational facilities.

Israeli police said they were investigating Wednesday after vandals damaged cars and daubed racist graffiti in a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank, in a suspected "price tag" attack.

Israel's plan to build new settler homes in a particularly sensitive area of the occupied West Bank would destroy the prospect of a two-state solution, Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Maliki said Wednesday.

The plan to build 3,500 new homes in an area known as E1 "is so dangerous, more dangerous than any other settlement plans in the West Bank," al-Maliki told reporters on the sidelines of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Egypt was to hold a military funeral Wednesday for former president Hosni Mubarak, whose three decades of strong-arm rule ended in the Arab Spring protests of 2011.

Turkey will not take the "smallest step back" in Syria's last rebel bastion of Idlib, where several of its army posts have been surrounded, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday.

The UN Security Council on Tuesday renewed its sanctions regime on Yemen for another year, after tense negotiations between Britain and Russia, which threatened to veto any mention, even implicit, of Iran.

Providing neutral space for talks on ending Afghanistan's 18-year conflict has boosted Qatar's international profile and helped it defy a painful embargo enforced by neighbours and former allies.

Regime air strikes and artillery fire in northwestern Syria, including on schools in the city of Idlib, killed 19 civilians on Tuesday, a war monitor said.

A Bulgarian court handed a Swiss man a five-year jail term for terrorism and arms smuggling after he was caught, heavily armed, on his way to Syria in 2018.