The Gulf nation of Bahrain plans to put three religious reformers on trial Tuesday for allegedly questioning the foundations of Islam, a case that has divided the Shiite majority of the country ruled by a Sunni monarchy.

The three are members of Tajdeed, a local Shiite cultural society that advocates open discussion of religion, and whose members have questioned Islamic jurisprudence and scholarly opinions. Such questioning is taboo in many parts of the Muslim world, where religious and political authorities enforce orthodoxy.

Saudi Arabia hopes to send medical volunteers to areas of Syria rocked by the recent earthquake that killed thousands in the war-torn country, an official told AFP on Monday.

Israel has told the Biden administration it will rein in the approval of new West Bank settlement outposts, the prime minister's office said Monday, a day after a potential diplomatic crisis was averted at the United Nations over Israeli-Palestinian tensions.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would not greenlight any new wildcat settlements in the West Bank beyond nine such outposts built without authorization that it approved retroactively earlier this month. The statement, however, made no mention of the thousands of additional settlement homes in existing settlements officials say are to be soon approved.

Israel's government on Monday was pressing ahead with a contentious plan to overhaul Israel's legal system, despite an unprecedented uproar that has included mass protests, warnings from military and business leaders and calls for restraint by the United States.

Thousands of demonstrators were expected to gather outside the parliament, or Knesset, for a second straight week to rally against the plan as lawmakers prepared to hold an initial vote.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and separately with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, reaffirming U.S. support for a "two-state solution" in the region and asking the two to "restore calm."

Helicopter-borne U.S. troops working with Syrian Kurdish-led forces have captured an Islamic State provincial official in Syria, the U.S. military said.

An Israeli air strike in Syria killed 15 people early Sunday and badly damaged a building in a Damascus district that is home to several state security agencies, a war monitoring group said. 

Civilians, including two women, were among those killed in "the deadliest Israeli attack in the Syrian capital" so far, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The death toll from an attack blamed on the Islamic State group in Syria has risen to 68, a war monitor said Saturday, the deadliest attack in over a year.

Mass protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government focusing on deeply controversial reforms of the judicial system have united diverse groups fearing it would give the legislative branch nearly unchecked authority.

Netanyahu and his allies in government, the most right-wing in Israel's history, say the reforms are necessary to correct an imbalance that has given judges too much power over elected officials.

More than 140 trucks carrying desperately-needed aid have crossed into rebel-held northwestern Syria from Turkey since a giant earthquake devastated the region last week, the United Nations said Friday.

"Since February 9 up to last night, we had a total of 143 trucks going through the Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salama border crossings," Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, told reporters in Geneva.