Palestinian factions have met in Egypt to discuss reconciliation efforts as violence in the occupied West Bank surged between Israel and Palestinian militants.

The main groups, Hamas and Fatah, have been split since 2007 and repeated reconciliation attempts having failed, so expectations for the one-day meeting were low.

Several thousand people briefly took to the streets across the Gaza Strip to protest chronic power outages and difficult living conditions, providing a rare public show of discontent with the territory's Hamas government. Hamas security forces quickly dispersed the gatherings.

Marches took place in Gaza City, the southern town of Khan Younis and other locations, chanting "what a shame" and in one place burning Hamas flags, before police moved in and broke up the protests.

A shooting at a heavily fortified security facility in the restive part of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula has killed at least four police, including a senior officer, two security and health officials said.

At least 21 other forces were wounded in the shooting at the National Security headquarters in el-Arish, the capital city of North Sinai province, they said.

An escalating dispute over a gas field in the Gulf poses an early challenge to a Chinese-brokered agreement to reconcile regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Saudi Arabia and neighboring Kuwait jointly claim the offshore Al-Durra gas field. Iran says it has rights to the field, which it refers to as Arash. The two sides held talks in Iran in March but were unable to agree on a border demarcation.

Power was cut off in large swaths of southern and central Iraq for much of Saturday during scorching summer heat and observances of the Shiite holy day of Ashoura after a fire broke out at a power station in the southern city of Basra.

Saudi Arabia plans to host talks next weekend to discuss a path towards peace in Ukraine, convening representatives from Kyiv, Western powers and developing countries, officials told AFP.

Kurdish-led armed groups in Iraq and Syria alleged that Turkish airstrikes killed a total of eight of their fighters Friday.

The counterterrorism service of the regional government in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq said in a statement that four members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, were killed and another wounded in a Turkish drone strike in Sharbazher district in Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdish region of Iraq.

The lower house of Jordan's parliament has passed legislation to punish online speech deemed harmful to national unity, drawing accusations from human rights groups of a new crackdown on free expression in a country where censorship and repression are increasingly common.

U.S. President Joe Biden has dispatched his national security adviser Jake Sullivan to Saudi Arabia for talks with the kingdom's de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the White House pushes for a normalization of relations between the country and Israel.

The White House in a brief statement said that Sullivan arrived in Jeddah on Thursday for talks with the crown prince, who is often referred to by his initial MbS, and other Saudi officials. The wide-ranging talks covered initiatives to "advance a common vision for a more peaceful, secure, prosperous, and stable Middle East," and efforts to find a permanent end to the years-long conflict between the Saudis and Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen, according to the White House.

An impasse at the United Nations over a border crossing with Syria's last rebel-held enclave is putting 4.1 million Syrian there in danger, the president of the International Rescue Committee warned this week.

David Miliband's comments came more than two weeks after the U.N. Security Council failed to renew the mandate for the Bab al-Hawa border crossing between Syria and Turkey, which secures aid for Syrians in the enclave.