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.

At least 12 people were killed Thursday after a gas tank exploded at an Egyptian fertiliser factory on the Red Sea coast, according to a security source.

Residents of a Cairo island with lush fields and unpaved roads, a world apart from Egypt's traffic-choked metropolis, are determined to stay put as judges rule on their possible expulsion.

For decades, his land was his life. Now, like other Sunni Arab farmers in Iraq's diverse north, Mahdi Abu Enad is cut off from his fields, fearing reprisal attacks.

A bullish US President Donald Trump predicted Wednesday that the Islamic State group would be wiped off the map within hours, as he unfurled printouts showing the jihadists' shrinking presence in Iraq and Syria.

Trump claimed American forces have inflicted significant casualties on the battlefield in the past month.

Top U.S. diplomat Mike Pompeo and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Wednesday to counter Iranian "aggression" as the two met in Jerusalem just weeks ahead of Israel's elections.

Pompeo was on a regional tour focused largely on Iran, but the meeting and his warm words on Netanyahu's leadership will likely be seen as support from U.S. President Donald Trump's administration amid the Israeli premier's re-election fight.