Iraqi-led forces have cut off the Islamic State group's last supply line from Mosul to Syria, completing the isolation of the jihadist stronghold, security officials said Wednesday.

An air strike by an Arab coalition battling Yemeni rebels killed 12 civilians in the northwest of the country on Wednesday, rebel media and witnesses said.

A Baghdad court has issued arrest warrants for two correspondents with a Saudi newspaper over a false news report accusing Iranian pilgrims of sexually harassing Iraqi women.

Israel's hardline defense minister said Wednesday that he does not expect any new U.S. Middle East policy initiative from Barack Obama in the final weeks of his presidency.

Dozens of civilians tried to flee rebel-held east Aleppo overnight but were forced back by gunfire, as the Syrian army on Wednesday pressed an offensive to recapture the whole city.

Countries who back the moderate Syrian opposition, including the United States and Gulf nations, will meet in Paris in early December, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Wednesday.

Ayrault said he had invited "countries who are friends of Syrian democracy and of the democratic Syrian opposition" to the French capital. 

An airport security official says Egyptian authorities have banned a prominent human rights activist, who heads a center investigating police abuses, from leaving the country.

Aida Seif el-Dawla, a psychiatrist and co-founder of the Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, was boarding a flight to Tunisia on Wednesday to attend a meeting of non-governmental organizations. Security authorities at Cairo international airport told her she couldn't leave the country because her name is on a travel-ban list, according to the security official.

An airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition on Wednesday "disabled" the fourth bridge on the Tigris River in Mosul, leaving the northern Iraqi city with a single functioning bridge, according to the Iraqi military and the Islamic State's media arm.

The Aamaq news agency gave no details on the airstrike, the second to target a Mosul bridge this week and the fourth since shortly before the Oct. 17 start of the Iraqi government's campaign to retake the city from the extremist group.

A controversial Israeli bill to quiet the Muslim call to prayer is to go forward after it was amended so as not to affect the Jewish Shabbat siren, the speaker's office said Wednesday.

Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, had blocked the draft law in its original form for fear it would also force the toning down of the sirens that announce the start of the Jewish day of rest at sundown each Friday.

A U.S. drone strike has killed a senior al-Qaida leader in Syria who previously operated in Afghanistan, the Defense Department announced Tuesday.

The November 18 strike near Sarmada in northwestern Syria targeted Abu Afghan al-Masri, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said.