Israel's foreign minister has said that the Gulf Arab state of Oman has decided to allow Israeli planes to fly through its airspace. The announcement was another sign of closer ties between Israel and some Arab countries.

Oman's Civil Aviation Authority tweeted that it "affirms that the Sultanate's airspace is open for all carriers that meet the requirements of the Authority for overflying," without directly mentioning Israel.

A Palestinian died Friday after being wounded a day earlier in clashes with Israeli forces in the south of the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian hospital official said.

Mohammed Ismail Jawabreh, 22, died after being shot in the head on Thursday "during clashes with occupation forces" in Al-Aroub camp north of Hebron, said the official at the city's Al-Ahly hospital, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Tunisian security forces have arrested prominent opposition figure Jawhar Ben Mbarek, his sister told AFP on Friday, the latest detention in a crackdown against rivals of President Kais Saied.

"Jawhar was arrested late last night and we haven't seen the charges against him," said Dalila Msaddek, who is also a lawyer.

An Israeli parliamentary committee has approved new funding for Benjamin Netanyahu and his family, giving the prime minister a boost in personal spending at a time when he is facing mass protests over his policies and as the economy is on shaky ground.

The committee voted to approve public funds to cover expenses incurred by the Netanyahus at their private homes in Jerusalem and the exclusive seaside town of Caesarea, as well as an increase of thousands of dollars a year in clothing expenses for both Netanyahu and his wife, Sara.

One day in the fall of 1998, Shivi Drori, a young farmer fresh out of the Israeli army, brought three trailers to a rugged hilltop deep in the occupied West Bank and began to plant raspberries.

It was an unauthorized settlement in the heart of territory claimed by the Palestinians, but Drori, now 49, said he considered himself to be "in a way, working with the government."

Israel's far-right government has granted approval for over 7,000 new homes in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, settlement backers and opponents said. The move defies growing international opposition to construction in the occupied territory.

The announcement came just days after the U.N. Security Council passed a statement strongly criticizing Israeli settlement construction on occupied lands claimed by the Palestinians. The United States, Israel's closest ally, blocked what would have been an even tougher legally binding resolution, with diplomats saying they had received Israeli assurances of refraining from unilateral acts for six months.

The death toll from the massive earthquake that hit parts of Turkey and Syria on Feb. 6 continues to rise as more bodies are retrieved from the rubble of demolished buildings. A magnitude 6.4 earthquake that struck the already battered province of Hatay this week damaged or demolished more buildings, compounding the devastation.

Here's a look at the key developments Thursday from the aftermath of the earthquake.

The deaths of 11 Palestinians in an Israeli raid in the West Bank comes a year into a spiral of violence that has killed over 250 Palestinians and 35 Israelis in the past 12 months.

AFP looks back at some of the deadliest incidents since a spate of attacks in Israel in spring last year prompted authorities to launch a series of ever deadlier "counter-terrorism" raids.

The northern West Bank city of Nablus, the Palestinian commercial center, resembled a war zone on Wednesday, after a daytime Israeli military raid triggered a firefight that killed at least 10 Palestinians and wounded more than 100 others.

It was the latest bloody escalation in a monthslong surge of Israeli raids into the the occupied territory that has led to the deaths of some 200 Palestinians and the arrest of at least 2,600 others. Last month, a similarly deadly raid in the northern West Bank city of Jenin triggered a Palestinian attack outside a synagogue in Jerusalem and a burst of rocket fire from Gaza.

Ahmed Qureia, a former Palestinian prime minister and one of the architects of interim peace deals with Israel, has died at age 85.

A key player in the 1993 Oslo peace accords, Qureia witnessed the rise of the dream of Palestinian statehood that surged during the negotiations. But he also saw those hopes recede, with the prospect of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drifting further than ever. Domestically, Qureia was riddled with corruption charges that tainted his reputation.