Israeli forces and armed Palestinians exchanged fire during an Israeli arrest raid in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank early Tuesday, leaving two Palestinians dead, Israeli and Palestinian officials said.

One of those killed in the Jenin camp was identified as a 22-year-old member of the militant Islamic Jihad group; he had been shot in the head. The other was an 18-year-old.

They file into neighboring countries by the hundreds of thousands — refugees from Ukraine clutching children in one arm, belongings in the other. And they're being heartily welcomed, by leaders of countries like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania.

But while the hospitality has been applauded, it has also highlighted stark differences in treatment given to migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa, particularly Syrians who came in 2015. Some of the language from these leaders has been disturbing to them, and deeply hurtful.

The United Arab Emirates campaigned hard for a seat on the U.N. Security Council in the country's international push to highlight the 50-year anniversary of its formation. But it got more than it bargained for with Russia's war on Ukraine.

The federation of sheikhdoms, home to Dubai's skyscrapers, abstained in a Security Council vote late last week condemning Moscow's invasion. The Emirates now carefully hedges its statements to avoid angering a country crucial to its economy as it tries to shake off the coronavirus pandemic.

The Israeli tech company NSO Group has filed a libel lawsuit against an Israeli newspaper after it published a series of explosive articles claiming Israeli police unlawfully used its spyware on dozens of public figures.

The articles by the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist published over recent weeks triggered an uproar over what the newspaper claimed was the police's unfettered use of sophisticated phone hacking software on a broad swath of figures. An investigation into the reports, which were unsourced, found no indication of abuse.

Qatar paid more than $10 million to a company staffed by former CIA operatives in an attempt to silence criticism from the head of German soccer against the wealthy Arab nation's hosting of the 2022 World Cup, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.

The multi-year covert influence operation, codenamed "Project Riverbed," targeted Theo Zwanziger, a former FIFA executive committee member and president of the German soccer federation who was an outspoken critic of the 2010 decision to award the planet's most popular sports tournament to Qatar, according to internal company records reviewed by the AP.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett held a phone call Sunday with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the conflict in Ukraine, the premier's office said, following reports Kyiv has asked Israel to mediate.

Thousands of young Arabs who took up studies in Ukraine, often fleeing violence back home, are appealing to be rescued from a new nightmare -- Russia's full scale invasion of the country.

More than 10,000 Arab students attend university in Ukraine, drawn to the former Soviet republic by a low cost of living and, for many, the lure of relative safety compared with their own troubled homelands.

With Russian forces in neighboring Syria, Washington its unswerving ally and about a million citizens with ties to the former Soviet Union, Israel is seeking a delicate balance in the Ukraine crisis.

Israel condemned Russia's attack on Ukraine Thursday as a "violation of the international order" but underlined its close ties with both Moscow and Kyiv. 

The Palestinian U.N. ambassador, wearing a mask saying "End Apartheid,"has accused Israel of engaging in "apartheid" in nearly a dozen ways, and Israel's ambassador accused him of regurgitating claims from the Palestinian Authority, which he said "promotes hate, incitement, violence and terror."

The exchange at the U.N. Security Council's monthly meeting on the Middle East reflected the huge chasm between Israel and the Palestinians, and the immense challenge to ending decades of conflict with a two-state solution that would see the antagonists live side-by-side in peace, as the United Nations and many others have sought for years.