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Iran said Wednesday it has agreed with Saudi Arabia to reschedule an Asian Champions League match after the Saudi team walked out at the last minute, apparently over the presence of a statue of a slain Iranian general.
The walkout appeared to further strain a recent rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, longtime rivals who have backed opposite sides in conflicts across the Middle East. But in the days since, both sides have appeared eager to move past it.

A video that shows ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting on the ground beside a procession of foreign Christian worshipers carrying a wooden cross in the holy city of Jerusalem has ignited intense outrage and a flurry of condemnation in the Holy Land.
The spitting incident, which the city's minority Christian community lamented as the latest in an alarming surge of religiously motivated attacks, drew rare outrage on Tuesday from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials.

Turkish warplanes have carried out new airstrikes against suspected Kurdish militant sites in northern Iraq, days after a suicide attack in the Turkish capital. Police, meanwhile, detained almost 1,000 people in raids across Turkey.
A defense ministry statement said the air raids hit 16 targets, including caves, shelters and depots, used by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK in the neighboring region. It said the operation aimed to protect Turkey's borders and prevent terror attacks.

Tunisia has announced it would reject an installment of funds sent by Europe to help the debt-ridden country patrol the Mediterranean Sea as migrant boat crossings spike to levels not seen in several years.
President Kais Saied on Monday accused the European Union of not following through on agreements made earlier this year to help Tunisia patrol its border, curb smuggling and balance its federal budget. Though he called the disbursement "a small amount," Saied said the decision was less about its size and more about how it "lacks respect."

Andrés Roemer, a Mexican author, playwright and former diplomat, was arrested in Israel and will be extradited to Mexico where he is wanted for alleged sex crimes, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said.
Roemer has been wanted in Mexico since 2021 for allegedly abusing at least eight women.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi has confirmed he will run for a new term in elections scheduled for December, entering the race as the clear favorite and as his government wrestles with rising inflation and mounting debt.
Egypt will hold a presidential election over three days on December 10-12, with a runoff on Jan. 8-10 if no candidate secures more than 50% of the vote.

A Saudi football team refused to play a match in Iran on Monday because of the presence of busts of a slain Iranian general placed on the sidelines, Saudi state media reported.
The Saudi Al Ittihad club was scheduled to play Iran's Sepahan in the the Asian Champions League, one of several matches made possible by a recent diplomatic rapprochement between the longtime Mideast rivals that has recently come under strain.

Syrian state media said Tuesday that the Israeli military carried out airstrikes in a strategic eastern province wounding two soldiers and causing material damage. There was no comment from Israel on the reported strikes.
Syria's state news agency, SANA, quoted an unnamed military official as saying the airstrikes late Monday targeted military positions in Deir el-Zour.

A decorated Israeli veteran of tank battles on the Syrian front in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Avigdor Kahalani remembers the conflict, despite its heavy toll, as a "slap in the face" Israel needed.
The twin attack by Egypt and Syria on October 6 caught Israel by surprise on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar -- Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement -- when the nation comes to a virtual standstill.

Christian religious leaders in northern Iraq called for an international investigation Monday into a deadly wedding fire that killed more than 100 people last week and slammed the government's probe, which had blamed the blaze on negligence and lack of precautionary measures.
An Iraqi Syriac Catholic priest, meanwhile, said widespread corruption in the country and the influence of armed militias on the government was one of the factors that enabled the fire.
