Governments worldwide are stepping up efforts to engage with Syria's new interim rulers, just over a week after Islamist-led rebels ousted president Bashar al-Assad, ending decades of brutal rule and civil war.

The lightning offensive that captured the capital Damascus on December 8 led to celebrations across the country and beyond.

Personal photos of ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad have surfaced from his abandoned residences, sparking ridicule among Syrians who until days ago were persecuted for criticizing his carefully crafted public image.

The intimate and candid photos, reportedly discovered in albums from Assad's mansions in the hills of Damascus and Aleppo, offer a stark contrast to the polished, glamorous image that Assad and his father projected as they led Syria for half a century.

In central Gaza's Nuseirat urban refugee camp, mourners gathered Monday for the funeral of a Palestinian journalist working for Al-Jazeera who was killed the day before in a strike on a point for Gaza’s civil defense agency. They carried him through the street from the hospital, his blue bulletproof vest resting atop his body.

Al-Jazeera said Ahmad Baker al-Louh, 39, had been covering rescue operations of a family wounded in an earlier bombing when he was killed.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, reported early Monday that Israeli airstrikes pounded missile warehouses and other former Syrian army sites along Syria’s coast in the “most violent strikes in the Syrian coast region since the beginning of the (Israeli) strikes in 2012.”

The Israeli military declined to comment on the strikes.

Germany's foreign minister is warning anyone involved in atrocities for the ousted Syrian government against seeking refuge in her country, saying they would face "the full force of the law."

Germany has been a major destination for Syrian refugees over the past decade, and several hundred thousand Syrian nationals live there. In rulings since 2021, former Syrian secret police officers already have been convicted in Germany for overseeing or facilitating the abuse of detainees.

American officials have been in direct contact with the terrorist-designated rebel group that led the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Saturday.

Blinken, speaking at a news conference in Jordan, was the first U.S. official to publicly confirm contacts between the Biden administration and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, which led a coalition of armed opposition groups that drove Assad from power and into asylum in Russia last weekend.

At Damascus' international airport, the new head of security — one of the rebels who marched across Syria to the capital — arrived with his team. The few maintenance workers who showed up for work huddled around Maj Hamza al-Ahmed, eager to learn what will happen next.

They quickly unloaded all the complaints they had been too afraid to express during the rule of President Bashar Assad, which now, inconceivably, is over.

The United Nations special envoy for Syria on Sunday called for a quick end to Western sanctions after the ouster of President Bashar Assad.

The Syrian government has been under strict sanctions by the United States, European Union and others for years as a result of Assad's brutal response to what began as peaceful anti-government protests in 2011 and later spiraled into a civil war.

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati has called for Syrians who sought refuge in his country to return home following the fall of Syria's longtime leader, Bashar al-Assad.

"The consequences of the Syrian war made Lebanon home to the largest number of refugees per capita, with one-third of our population comprising of Syrian refugees", Mikati said Saturday at a Rome political festival.

Israel has launched more than 60 strikes on Syrian territory over the past few hours, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said late Saturday.

Israel fired 61 missiles at Syrian military sites in less than five hours Saturday evening, it reported, maintaining a campaign which started after rebel forces toppled president Bashar al-Assad nearly a week ago.