Two senior Libyan officials began two days of talks Tuesday on constitutional arrangements for elections, the latest U.N. effort to bridge gaps between the country's rivals.

Aguila Saleh, the influential speaker of the country's east-based parliament, and Khaled al-Meshri, head of the government's Supreme Council of State, based in the west, in the capital of Tripoli, met at the U.N. headquarters in Geneva.

A drone strike by the U.S.-led coalition in northwestern Syria killed a senior member of an al-Qaida-linked group, Syrian opposition activists and the U.S. military said Tuesday.

The attack on the suspected militant, who was riding a motorcycle at the time, came shortly before midnight on Monday — the latest in a series of strikes over the past years targeting al-Qaida-linked militants in northwestern Syria.

Jordan's prime minister said Tuesday that he has instructed authorities to launch an investigation into the deadly blast the previous day at the Red Sea port of Aqaba that killed at least 13 people.

A crane loading chlorine tanks onto a ship on Monday dropped one of them, causing an explosion of toxic yellow smoke. Along with those killed, some 250 were sickened, authorities said.

Thirteen people were killed, including at least four Asian migrants, when toxic chlorine gas escaped on the dockside in the Jordanian Red Sea port of Aqaba, officials said.

A poisonous gas leak in Jordan's southern port city of Aqaba on Monday killed at least 10 people and injured some 250, authorities said.

The Public Security Directorate said a gas tank sprung a leak while being transported. It did not identify the contents of the tanker.

The UN's World Food Program has announced further reductions of food aid to war-torn Yemen as a result of funding gaps, price rises and the fallout from the Ukraine war.

Twenty years after Israel decided to build its controversial separation barrier, the network of walls, fences and closed military roads remains in place, even as any partition of the land appears more remote than ever.

Israel is actively encouraging its Jewish citizens to settle on both sides of the barrier as it builds and expands settlements deep inside the occupied West Bank, more than a decade after the collapse of any serious peace talks.

The African Union Commission chief has voiced his shock at the "violent and degrading" treatment of African migrants trying to cross from Morocco into Spain after 23 people died, and called for an investigation in the incident.

The United States, Israel and four Arab countries agreed to closer cooperation and annual foreign ministers' meetings on Monday, two weeks before President Joe Biden's first visit to the Middle East.

A former UK human rights lawyer on Monday denied fraud charges connected to claims of human rights abuses made against British soldiers in the Iraq war.