Iran claimed responsibility for a missile strike Sunday on the northern Iraqi city of Arbil, saying it targeted an Israeli "strategic center."

Authorities in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region had earlier said 12 ballistic missiles rained down on Arbil in a pre-dawn attack targeting U.S. interests that slightly wounded two civilians and caused material damage.

With Russia's war on Ukraine now in its third week, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday approved bringing in volunteer fighters from the Middle East, particularly Syria.

Syria clearly has a rich pool of fighters to draw from. Russia's military is deeply entrenched in the Mideast country, where its intervention - starting in 2015 - helped Syrian President Bashar Assad gain the upper hand in the ongoing, 11-year civil war.

Libya's parliament-appointed prime minister  said Friday that armed groups backing him had withdrawn from positions around Tripoli, after the U.N. warned of a new escalation in the divided country.

An oil refinery in Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh, was attacked by drone, causing a small fire that did not cause injuries or affect supplies, the energy ministry said Friday.

The statement did not specify where the drone strike was launched from. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Saudi Arabia has said it had rescued two young American women from Yemen in a joint special operations mission with the United States.

The Saudi defense ministry said the women, both Yemeni-American teenagers, were being held by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa after having been taken captive while visiting their grandmother.

The Kremlin said Friday that fighters from Syria and the Middle East would be allowed to fight for Russia in Ukraine, after President Vladimir Putin backed a plan to send volunteers to battle there.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia's defense minister had said that "most of those who want and who asked (to fight) are citizens of Middle East countries and Syrians".

Israel's parliament has renewed a temporary law dating back to 2003 that bars Israeli citizens from extending citizenship or even residency to Palestinian spouses from the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Israel says the law, which was first enacted during a Palestinian uprising, is needed for security. Critics view it as a racist measure aimed at maintaining the country's Jewish majority. The law is aimed at Palestinians and does not apply to Jewish settlers in the West Bank as they already have Israeli citizenship.

Besieging cities, shelling civilian infrastructure and arranging "safe corridors": the tactics used by Russia in its war on Ukraine mirror those it tested and fine-tuned to drain resistance in Syria's conflict.

But unlike its Syria play book, the challenge Russia faces from a Western-backed army in Ukraine dwarfs that of Syrian rebels who lacked military might or broad international backing, analysts said.

The growth of Israel's West Bank settler population accelerated last year, according to figures released by a pro-settler group on Thursday, despite renewed American pressure to rein in construction on occupied territory that the Palestinians want for a future state.

The figures show that a settlement surge initiated when President Donald Trump was in office shows no sign of slowing down. Trump provided unprecedented support for Israel's claims to land seized in war, reversing decades of U.S. policy.

Israel's president on Thursday ended his landmark trip to Turkey with a visit to the Jewish community in Istanbul, a day after the two countries hailed a new era in relations.

Isaac Herzog held talks in Ankara on Wednesday with Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the first visit by an Israeli president since 2007.