Iraqi officials on Tuesday commemorated Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the senior commander killed in last month's U.S. drone strike on Baghdad that targeted powerful Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

Tensions escalated Tuesday between Syria's regime and rebel-backer Turkey as a Syrian military helicopter was shot down and Ankara warned of a "heavy price" for any attacks on its forces.

The massive aid operation for war-torn Yemen is under severe threat in the face of mounting obstruction from Huthi rebels, officials told AFP Tuesday ahead of a crunch meeting expected to be held in Brussels.

Dozens of cars in an Israeli Arab village were vandalised overnight, police said Tuesday, with slogans sprayed on a mosque indicating the involvement of Jewish extremists.

Syrian government and allied forces on Tuesday wrested the last segment of a key highway from rebels in the northwest of the country, a war monitor said.

Throughout Syria's civil war, Maad al-Khalaf helped other Syrians find shelter in the opposition enclave in the northwest as they fled government military advances around the country. Now he's the one in need of refuge as a swift offensive overwhelmed his home village.

He joined hundreds of thousands in Idlib province scrambling to escape the widening, multi-front assault by President Bashar Assad's forces, squeezing into whatever structures they can find in a shrinking territory.

One protester was killed on Monday in Iraq's southern city of Nasiriyah after university security guards opened fire on demonstrators trying to block the campus entrance, medical sources told AFP.

Five Turkish soldiers were killed on Monday by Syrian regime artillery fire in the northwestern province of Idlib, the last major rebel bastion, Turkey's defense ministry said.

A Russia-backed regime offensive on the last major rebel bastion in northwestern Syria has displaced close to 700,000 people since December, the United Nations told AFP on Monday.

An Israeli court Monday sentenced a firebrand Islamic cleric to 28 months in prison for incitement to "terrorism" in connection with deadly unrest at a Jerusalem holy site in 2017.

Raed Salah had been convicted by Haifa magistrates' court of "incitement to terror" for "praising, sympathizing or encouraging terrorism" in remarks made after attackers killed two policemen on the Haram al-Sharif mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.