A Saudi envoy on a rare visit to the occupied West Bank pledged Tuesday that the Palestinian cause will be "a cornerstone" of any normalization deal the oil-rich kingdom may strike with Israel.

The delegation headed by Nayef al-Sudairi was Saudi Arabia's first in three decades to the West Bank, which Israel has occupied along with other territories since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Saudi Arabia on Tuesday condemned an attack on its territory that killed two Bahraini military personnel near the border with war-torn Yemen.

Bahrain's military said late Monday that one officer and one enlisted soldier had been killed in what it described as a drone attack perpetrated by Yemen's Huthi rebels.

Libya's chief prosecutor said Monday he ordered the detention of eight current and former officials pending his investigation into the collapse of two dams earlier this month, a disaster that sent a wall of water several meters high through the center of a coastal city and left thousands of people dead.

The two dams outside the city of Derna broke up on Sep. 11 after they were overwhelmed by Storm Daniel, which caused heavy rain across eastern Libya. The failure of the structures inundated as much as a quarter of the city, officials have said, destroying entire neighborhoods and sweeping people out to sea.

Israeli airstrikes have struck militant sites in Gaza on Sunday for the third straight day, the Israeli military said, after Palestinian militants near the border fence launched incendiary balloons into Israel and threw an explosive at soldiers. The strike came on the heels of an Israeli military raid in the northern West Bank that Palestinian health officials said killed two Palestinians.

It was the latest bloodshed in a surge of violence during a sensitive Jewish holiday period. A series of violent escalations on the border between Israel and Gaza over the past week has raised the specter of an escalation for the first time since a brief round of conflict last May between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group.

The Biden administration is poised to admit Israel this week into an exclusive club that will allow its citizens to travel to the United States without a U.S. visa despite Washington's ongoing concerns about the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinian Americans.

U.S. officials say an announcement of Israel's entry into the Visa Waiver Program is planned for late in the week, just before the end of the federal budget year on Saturday, which is the deadline for Israel's admission without having to requalify for eligibility next year.

Israeli forces shot dead two Palestinians in a pre-dawn raid Sunday in the West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said, as the army confirmed "counter-terrorism" activity in the occupied territory.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told the U.N. General Assembly on that Israel is "at the cusp" of a historic breakthrough leading to a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia, without outlining a clear path over the significant obstacles facing such an accord.

He struck an optimistic tone throughout his roughly 25-minute address — and, once again, used a visual aid. He displayed contrasting maps showing Israel's isolation at the time of its creation in 1948 and the six countries that have normalized relations with it, including four that did so in 2020 in the so-called Abraham Accords.

A day-long communication outage in a flood-stricken city in eastern Libya further complicated the work of teams searching for bodies under the rubble and at sea Wednesday.

The country's chief prosecutor, meanwhile, vowed to take "serious measures" to deliver justice for the victims of the floods, which killed thousands of people and devastated the coastal city of Derna more than a week ago.

Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a "strategic partnership" with Syria on Friday during talks with President Bashar al-Assad, who is seeking financial support to help rebuild his devastated country.

The leaders met on the eve of the Asian Games opening ceremony, which Assad will attend as part of his first visit to China since 2004.

The head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, Esmail Qaani, has visited Syria to oversee a joint military drill, media outlets in the Islamic republic said.

Qaani, appointed Quds Force commander after a U.S. drone strike on Baghdad killed its revered leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020, met senior Syrian officials in Damascus, Tasnim news agency reported late Thursday.