U.S. Central Intelligence Agency chief William Burns was due in Israel Tuesday for talks on common foe Iran, as rising tensions overshadow talks on restoring a landmark nuclear deal.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Naftali Bennett gave no details of the agenda for the CIA chief's talks in Israel.

Kitted out and nowhere to go: many young Iraqis in Baghdad make an effort to be hip, even as they admit their country may have no future.

Regime shelling has killed four children in Syria's last major rebel bastion in the northwest of the country, a Britain-based war monitor said Sunday.

Israel conducted overnight air strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza in retaliation for the launching of incendiary balloons from the Palestinian enclave that caused fires in southern Israel, the country's military said early Saturday.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid is to visit Morocco next week, the two countries said Friday, in the first trip to the kingdom by Israel's top diplomat since they normalized ties.

A source at Morocco's foreign ministry told AFP that Lapid would visit on August 11-12 and meet with his counterpart, without providing further details.

A Palestinian shot by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank died of his wounds on Friday, the Palestinian health ministry said.

Israel's defense minister warned Thursday that his country is prepared to strike Iran, issuing the threat against the Islamic Republic after a fatal drone strike on a oil tanker at sea that his nation blamed on Tehran.

The comments by Benny Gantz come as Israel meanwhile lobbies countries for action at the United Nations over last week's attack on the oil tanker Mercer Street that killed two people. The tanker, struck off Oman in the Arabian Sea, is managed by a firm owned by an Israeli billionaire.

A British security guard who was killed in a suspected Iranian drone strike on an Israel-linked tanker was a former soldier in the British army, his employers said on Thursday.

Maritime security firm Ambrey said Adrian Underwood was on board the M/T Mercer Street when it came under attack in the Indian Ocean off Oman last Thursday.

The international chemical weapons watchdog has demanded more information from Syria about the reported recent destruction of two chlorine cylinders that had been linked to a 2018 deadly attack on the Syrian town of Douma -- a demand echoed Wednesday by several members of the U.N. Security Council.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said Syria's government sent a note to its secretariat July 9 reporting that the two cylinders were destroyed by a June 8 airstrike on a Syrian military facility which housed a former chemical weapons production facility.

The hijackers who captured a vessel off the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf of Oman left the ship Wednesday, the British navy reported, as radio traffic appeared to reveal a crew member onboard saying Iranian gunmen had stormed the asphalt tanker.

The incident — described by the British military's United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations the night before as a "potential hijack" — revived fears of an escalation in Mideast waters and ended with as much mystery as it began.