Ankara said Thursday it had uncovered a mass grave containing dozens of bodies in a Turkish-held region of Syria, accusing a US-backed Kurdish militia of the killings. 

But local authorities in the northern region of Afrin and a Syrian rights group said it was an informal cemetery and not a mass grave, disputing Turkey's accusations. 

Saudi Arabia has arrested more than 120 people suspected of supplying or procuring fraudulent coronavirus vaccine and test certificates, official media said Thursday, two days before a tightly controlled hajj.

The United Arab Emirates has opened an embassy in Israel, housed in Tel Aviv's new stock exchange building, in the latest normalization move under a deal brokered by Washington last year. 

The United States has warned Egypt not to target rights campaigners after a prominent activist was indicted, saying the issue would be a factor in arms sales to the ally.

Shelling by Syrian regime forces Thursday killed nine civilians, including three children, in the Idlib region in the country's northwest, a war monitor reported.

The deaths came amid an uptick in violations of a ceasefire deal that was brokered by Turkey and Russia in March 2020 and had since largely held.

The Israeli army said Thursday it had arrested between 20 and 30 Palestinian students in the occupied West Bank it accused of being "terror operatives" of Islamist group Hamas. 

Populist Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr has warned he will hold the Iraqi government responsible if it fails to action over a devastating fire that killed at least 60 people in a Covid isolation unit.

When Covid-19 hit Tunisia hard last September, the germ of an idea was born. Too many patients were overwhelming the system, so why not take medical care directly to them?

Qatar said Tuesday that it has been given a preliminary green light by a U.N. body on a proposal to control its own airspace, months after resolving a rift with its neighbors.

Grief and anger gripped the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah after fire swept through a Covid isolation unit killing 64 people and wounding dozens more.

The devastating Monday evening blaze in the city's Al-Hussein Hospital, which medics said was fuelled by the explosion of oxygen canisters, was the second such fire in Iraq in three months.