At least seven Syrian security personnel were killed and more than 20 wounded Thursday when a drone attack targeted a military academy in Homs province, a war monitor said.

"Seven dead and more than 20 regime officers wounded in a violent explosion in the area of the military academy in Homs, caused by an attack by drones during a graduation ceremony," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Israel is a nation perennially swept up in religious fervor and conflict. And yet, strikingly, a large portion of its population is secular, and even its insular ultra-Orthodox community loses a steady stream of members who tire of its strict religious rules.

The country is home to about 7 million Jews, almost half of the global Jewish population. But Jewish identity is a complex blend of religious and ethnonational identity; most Israeli Jews are not diligent observers of Judaism.

Israel has quietly helped fuel Azerbaijan's campaign to recapture Nagorno-Karabakh, supplying powerful weapons to Azerbaijan ahead of its lightening offensive last month that brought the ethnic Armenian enclave back under its control, officials and experts say.

Just weeks before Azerbaijan launched its 24-hour assault on Sept. 19, Azerbaijani military cargo planes repeatedly flew between a southern Israeli airbase and an airfield near Nagorno-Karabakh, according to flight tracking data and Armenian diplomats, even as Western governments were urging peace talks.

The role of sectarian divisions in fueling conflicts in Lebanon is one reason Talar Demirdjian distanced herself from religion.

"People either go very into their religion or their sects, or the other side." A Lebanese Armenian of Christian heritage, Demirdjian said about religion, "I don't even think about it enough to tick a label."

Israeli forces killed two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, the Palestinian health ministry said as the Israeli army reported soldiers were engaged in a shootout.

The health ministry said two men were killed by "occupation (Israeli) bullets near Tulkarem" in the northern West Bank. They were named as Abdul Rahman Atta, 23, and Huthaifa Faris, 27.

Turkish strikes Thursday on military and infrastructure targets in Kurdish-held northeastern Syria killed at least nine people, Kurdish security forces said, after Ankara had threatened raids in retaliation for a bomb attack.

While Turkey regularly carries out drone attacks in Syrian Kurds' semi-autonomous region, Ankara on Wednesday warned of more intense cross-border air raids, after concluding that militants who staged a weekend attack in the Turkish capital came from Syria.

Syrian army shelling killed an elderly woman and four of her children in the war-torn country's northwest, rescue workers and a monitor said on Thursday.

The overnight bombardment targeted their house in Kfar Nuran, close to the front line in the last rebel stronghold in the western province of Aleppo.

Turkey said on Wednesday that two suspected Kurdish militants who died while staging a weekend attack in Ankara had been trained in Syria.

In the ancient city of Jericho in the occupied West Bank, a prehistoric site has raised Palestinian hopes of a tourism boom after UNESCO declared it a World Heritage site.

Just a few dozen visitors braved the midday sun to stroll around Tell al-Sultan, where archaeologists have unearthed evidence of community life dating back about 10,000 years.

Iran said Wednesday it has agreed with Saudi Arabia to reschedule an Asian Champions League match after the Saudi team walked out at the last minute, apparently over the presence of a statue of a slain Iranian general.

The walkout appeared to further strain a recent rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, longtime rivals who have backed opposite sides in conflicts across the Middle East. But in the days since, both sides have appeared eager to move past it.