As winter nears and coronavirus cases surge across the Middle East, the regional director for the World Health Organization said Thursday the only way to avoid mass deaths is for countries to quickly tighten restrictions and enforce preventative measures.

In a press briefing from Cairo, Ahmed al-Mandhari, director of WHO's eastern Mediterranean region, which comprises most of the Middle East, expressed concern that countries in the area were lowering their guard after tough lockdowns imposed earlier this year.

Mike Pompeo said he will make the first visit by a US secretary of state to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Thursday, after labelling the pro-Palestinian BDS movement an anti-Semitic "cancer".

The U.S. will label the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which seeks to isolate Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians, as anti-Semitic, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday, calling the movement "a cancer".

Nurses hover over a patient to insert a breathing tube as his condition suddenly deteriorates. ICU beds fill up almost overnight. As one patient dies of the coronavirus and is wheeled out, another is whisked in to take his place. An exhausted doctor leans against a wheelchair for a breather.

The pace is dizzying at the largest isolation hospital in Syria's northwestern city of Idlib. There are no bombs falling outside and the wounded don't crowd bloodstained corridors amid a shaky cease-fire in the country's decade old civil war. Still, the intensive care unit staff is overwhelmed with beds full of elderly patients gasping for air.

Yazidis crowned a new spiritual leader on Wednesday at their holiest site of Lalish in northern Iraq, nearly two months after the death of the minority's top cleric.

Algeria's supreme court on Wednesday said the brother of former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika and two ex-intelligence chiefs convicted of conspiracy against the state would be retried after appeals.

Egyptian authorities on Wednesday arrested a second staff member of a leading local human rights group, the organization said, days after its office manager was detained.

Mike Pompeo is expected to become the first U.S. secretary of state ever to visit land used by settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Thursday.

Bahrain's foreign minister called for fresh Israeli-Palestinian peace talks during a landmark meeting Wednesday in Israel with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Eyeing Washington's withdrawal of 500 more troops from Iraq, pro-Iran factions have boldly resumed attacks on the U.S. embassy there despite suspicions outgoing President Donald Trump could strike back.