Children fleeing the jihadist-held Hawijah area in north Iraq are dying of thirst and being killed by makeshift bombs, Save the Children said on Thursday.

A Palestinian security official sentenced to jail for criticizing President Mahmud Abbas on Facebook for attending Shimon Peres' funeral has been pardoned, a rights group said on Thursday.

Turkey's foreign minister and his Arab counterparts in the Gulf on Thursday condemned "indiscriminate" air strikes on Syria's Aleppo and expressed "deep regret" at the U.N.'s inability to stop the raids.

Iran has sent two warships to the Gulf of Aden off Yemen's coast to protect commercial vessels, Iranian media said Thursday, at a time of heightened tension for the United States in the region.

The foreign ministers of France and Russia discussed Syria by telephone Thursday despite severe tensions over the crisis that led President Vladimir Putin to cancel a visit to Paris.

A top diplomat and longtime adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resigned from his post for personal reasons, the foreign ministry announced on Thursday.

The Iraqi foreign ministry summoned the Turkish ambassador on Thursday to protest the continued presence of Turkish troops in northern Iraq without Baghdad's permission, a ministry spokesman said.

Turkish troops are deployed in the Bashiqa area near the jihadist-held city of Mosul, and Turkey's prime minister has said that they will stay despite Baghdad's demands that they be withdrawn.

Russian and Syrian warplanes pounded Aleppo again on Thursday after two days of heavy bombardment that killed more than 70 civilians, as world powers prepared for last-ditch weekend talks on a ceasefire.

Turkey and Israel are to start examining the feasibility of building an undersea gas pipeline to pump Israeli gas to Turkish consumers and on to Europe, the Israeli energy minister said on Thursday.

"What we decided is to establish immediately a dialogue between our two governments... in order to examine the possibility and the feasibility of such a project," Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said after talks with Turkish counterpart Berat Albayrak in Istanbul.

An international human rights group said on Thursday that the Saudi-led coalition's recent bombing of a packed funeral in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, constitutes an apparent war crime.

In a damning report, the Human Rights Watch said that a disproportionate number of the victims were civilians and that remnants of munitions found at the site of the attack showed that they were American made.