Tunisia will hold on Sunday its second free presidential election by universal suffrage since the 2011 uprising that toppled an autocratic regime, with growing uncertainty over who will reach the next round.

Washington's top envoy for Syria rejected Thursday an allegation put forward in a U.N. report that some U.S.-led air strikes in the conflict-torn country could possibly be categorized as indiscriminate attacks, amounting to "war crimes."

The U.N. Security Council on Thursday unanimously adopted a resolution renewing its mission in Libya for another year and pledging to support struggling efforts to build a ceasefire in the war-torn country.

King Salman reiterated Saudi Arabia's condemnation of the Israeli prime minister's pre-election pledge to annex part of the West Bank, in a phone call Thursday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

A French court on Thursday handed a 10-month suspended sentence to a sister of the Saudi crown prince over the beating of a workman at a luxury residence in Paris in 2016.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Russia on Thursday to meet President Vladimir Putin, as he looks to convey the image of a statesman ahead of an election on September 17.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party was found Thursday to have violated Facebook's hate-speech policy after a post from his account saying Arabs "want to destroy us all".

Israeli Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon said Thursday a visiting senior US treasury official assured him that sanctions against Iran would remain in full force.

New official data obtained by The Associated Press shows a spike in Jewish settlement construction in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem since President Donald Trump took office in 2017, along with strong evidence of decades of systematic discrimination illustrated by a huge gap in the number of construction permits granted to Jewish and Palestinian residents.

The expansion of Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem, which Israel seized along with the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Mideast war, threatens to further complicate one of the thorniest issues in the conflict.

Israeli warplanes hit Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Palestinian rocket fire, a military statement said early Thursday.