Britain will send a second warship to the Gulf, officials said Friday, temporarily deploying two vessels near Tehran's waters as tensions surge after armed Iranian boats threatened a British oil tanker.

At least 10 civilians were killed Friday in Syrian regime air strikes in the country's northwest, including three children, a war monitor said.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Thursday strongly condemned air strikes in northwest Syria following reports that four health facilities were hit during a single day of bombing.

Libya's internationally recognised government on Thursday demanded urgent answers after Paris conceded French missiles were found at a base used by strongman Khalifa Haftar whose forces are fighting to take over the capital Tripoli.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed Iran's "malign" actions, the White House said Thursday, as escalating tensions between Tehran and Washington threatened to torpedo a landmark 2015 nuclear agreement.

A car bomb detonated near a church in the Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli in northeast Syria on Thursday wounding almost a dozen people, an AFP journalist and state media said.

The administrator of a Facebook page supporting Egyptian ex-president Hosni Mubarak was detained for 15 days for "spreading false information," a judicial source said Thursday. 

A Palestinian militant was killed by Israeli fire near the border fence in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, the enclave's Islamist rulers Hamas said.

A car bomb near a checkpoint manned by Turkey-backed rebels in the northern Syrian city of Afrin killed 13 people including eight civilians Thursday, a war monitor said.

Regime and jihadist-led forces were locked in clashes Thursday on the edge of an opposition bastion in northwest Syria after a jihadist-led advance that killed 71 fighters overnight, a monitor said.