Australian Transport Minister Catherine King said on Thursday that invasive gynecological examinations conducted on passengers at Doha's international airport in 2020 were part of the reason she refused to allow Qatar Airways to double its services to Australia.

King has faced intense questioning over why she decided on June 10 not to allow the airline to double its current 28 flights per week to Australia.

Sudan's army chief traveled to Qatar on Thursday for talks with the country's emir, making his third international trip since fighting broke out between the military and a rival paramilitary force in April, Sudanese state media said.

Sudan plunged into chaos almost five months ago when long-simmering tensions between the military, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, escalated into open warfare on April 15.

A daughter of a long-detained human rights activist in Bahrain said Thursday she would return to the island nation to press for his release while he and hundreds of other inmates are on a major hunger strike and even though she could be imprisoned as well.

The trip by Maryam al-Khawaja draws renewed attention to the plight of her 62-year-old ailing father, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a dual Danish-Bahraini national convicted of internationally criticized terrorism charges and held in what a United Nations panel calls an "arbitrary" imprisonment ever since.

A Palestinian youth has stabbed two people, moderately wounding one of them, in an attack outside a main entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem, authorities said.

Israeli police said the teen carried out the attack near Jaffa Gate after getting off a bus. The suspect, a 17-year-old Palestinian from east Jerusalem, was caught and arrested after a short chase. His name was not immediately released.

Morocco's senate president has postponed a historic visit to Israel due to a medical emergency, the Israeli parliament announced.

The announcement came just a day before Enaam Mayara was scheduled to visit Israel's Knesset, or parliament, on a trip aimed at cementing the fledgling ties between the two countries.

A former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank, joining a tiny but growing list of retired officials to endorse an idea that remains largely on the fringes of Israeli discourse and international diplomacy.

Tamir Pardo becomes the latest former senior official to have concluded that Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank amounts to apartheid, a reference to the system of racial separation in South Africa that ended in 1994.

Cypriot Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos met Kuwait's ambassador on Wednesday to condemn an attack on Kuwaiti tourists during anti-migrant violence in the island’s second city, Limassol.

He met Kuwait ambassador Abdullah Al-Kharafi after the Gulf emirate lodged a protest over the attack during racist-motivated violence in Limassol on Friday evening.

Israel's Supreme Court has delayed the first of three pivotal hearings on the legality of the judicial overhaul, spearheaded by the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu, after the country's attorney general expressed staunch opposition to the plan.

For the eight months since the coalition took power, Justice Minister Yariv Levin, a Netanyahu ally, has refused to convene the committee that selects the nation's judges, leaving numerous judgeships open across the country.

Israeli troops have killed a Palestinian militant during an army raid in the West Bank, Palestinian health officials said, while elsewhere in the occupied territory a teenage Palestinian gunman opened fire at Israeli soldiers, wounding one before being shot and killed.

The events marked the latest violence to roil the territory during one of the most violent stretches of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in nearly two decades. Israel has pressed on with near-nightly raids in the West Bank while Palestinian militants have ramped up shooting attacks against Israelis.

The weeklong clashes between rival U.S.-backed militias in eastern Syria, where hundreds of American troops are deployed, point to dangerous seams in the coalition that has kept a lid on the defeated Islamic State group for years. That could be an opportunity for the radical group to reemerge.

The violence also points to rising tensions between Kurds who dominate the region and the mainly Arab population, opening the door for Syrian President Bashar Assad and his allies, Russia and Iran, to try to make inroads in an oil-rich territory where they seek to drive out U.S. troops and restore Damascus' rule.