For two years, Toveet Israel and dozens of other residents of the Village of Peace have lived in fear.

Dimona, a city on the edge of the nation of Israel's Negev Desert, has been her home for 24 years. Her eight children were born here and know no other country. Now, she and 130 other undocumented members of the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem face deportation.

A recent string of public desecrations of the Quran by a handful of anti-Islam activists in Sweden has sparked an angry reaction in Muslim countries and raised questions – including in Sweden – about why such acts are allowed.

In the latest such incident, an Iraqi living in Sweden on Thursday stomped on and kicked Islam's holy book in a two-man rally outside the Iraqi Embassy in Stockholm. The protest was authorized by Swedish police, who kept a handful of agitated counterdemonstrators at a safe distance.

Thousands of Israelis joined a march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Friday in the latest protest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's vow to push through a controversial overhaul of the judiciary system.

Hundreds of protesters became thousands as Israelis joined the 70-kilometer march throughout the day in a demonstration against one of Israel's most far-right governments in history.

Middle East powerhouses Saudi Arabia and Iran have summoned Swedish diplomats to denounce Stockholm's permission for protests that desecrate the Quran on free speech grounds.

The separate moves by both majority-Muslim countries, announced in statements late Thursday, came amid heightened tensions between Sweden and Iraq over a Sweden-based Iraqi refugee who last month burnt pages of the Muslim religious text outside Stockholm's main mosque.

Egyptian researcher Patrick Zaki on Thursday walked out of prison, his family said, a day after President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi granted him a pardon in the wake of an international outcry.

Zaki's three-year prison sentence on Tuesday for "spreading false news" had prompted some participants to walk out of a government dialogue aimed at giving the opposition a voice.

As Jordan hosted regional talks this spring aimed at ending Syria's isolation after more than a decade of civil war, Syrian refugee Suzanne Dabdoob felt a deep pressure in her brain and in her ears, she said, a fear she hadn't felt since arriving to Jordan 10 years ago.

Ahead of the meeting, Syrian President Bashar Assad agreed that 1,000 Syrian refugees living in Jordan would be allowed to safely return home — a test case for the repatriation of far greater numbers. Jordan's top diplomat spoke only of voluntary returns. But panic spread through working-class east Amman, where Dabdoob and many other Syrians have built new lives in multistory, cement-block buildings.

An Israeli parliamentary committee has adopted a key clause of the hard-right government's controversial judicial reforms, a statement said Thursday, as protests intensified ahead of final votes on the bill.

Parliament's law committee approved the proposal, which would limit the "reasonability" clause that allows the judiciary to strike down government decisions, in a marathon debate that ended late on Wednesday.

Iraq's prime minister ordered the expulsion of the Swedish ambassador from Iraq and the withdrawal of the Iraqi charge d'affaires from Sweden on Thursday as a man desecrated of a copy of the Quran in Stockholm.

The diplomatic blowup came hours after protesters angered by the planned burning of a copy of the Quran stormed the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad, breaking into the compound and lighting a small fire.

Israeli troops shot and killed a Palestinian man near a shrine in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, Palestinian health officials said, in the latest bloodshed in a cycle of violence that has gripped the region.

The months of fighting with rising fatalities have shown no signs of abating and has become the worst violence between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank in nearly two decades.

Israeli airstrikes early Wednesday near Syria's capital Damascus killed three fighters loyal to President Bashar al-Assad's regime and wounded four others, a war monitor said.

Syrian state news agency SANA earlier reported two soldiers had been wounded in the overnight strikes. It quoted a military source as saying the bombing targeted "certain positions in the vicinity of Damascus."