The family of Egypt's imprisoned hunger-striking activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah said Monday that he has started drinking water again.

The announcement came in a letter that the family received from Abdel-Fattah through the prison authorities on Monday. It was dated on Saturday.

Israeli forces shot and killed a 19-year-old Palestinian woman during a raid in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Monday.

The Israeli military said soldiers opened fire on a vehicle that was accelerating toward them after they signaled for it to stop, adding that the incident was under review.

Iran launched a wave of cross-border missile and drone strikes Monday against Kurdish opposition groups based in northern Iraq, where local authorities reported one death and eight wounded.  

Tehran previously launched attacks that killed more than a dozen people in Iraq's Kurdistan region in late September, after accusing Kurdish armed groups based there of stoking a wave of unrest that has rocked the Islamic republic.

Israeli airstrikes killed two Syrian soldiers and wounded three others when they slammed into an airbase in the province of Homs, a Syrian army statement said.

The statement said Israeli warplanes fired missiles after flying over neighboring Lebanon. It added that some of the missiles were shot down before they hit their targets.

Lebanon has extradited a man said to be a grandnephew of Saddam Hussein to Iraq, where he is accused of involvement in a massacre by the Islamic State group, a security source said.

Bahrain voted Saturday in a parliamentary and local election just hours after hackers targeted government websites in the island kingdom.

The United Nations Friday cautioned that millions of people displaced by conflicts and persecution in the Middle East risk "extreme hardship" as winter approaches.

UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, said there was a dire need for more funds to support many displaced people at a time when the coming northern hemisphere winter is expected to be "far more challenging than in recent years". 

The speaker of Tunisia's dissolved parliament and arch-rival of President Kais Saied appeared in court on Thursday as part of a case involving money-laundering and "incitement to violence".

Three years ago, Fadel Abbas marched with tens of thousands of fellow Iraqis chanting for the "fall of the regime" in Baghdad's Tahrir Square, meaning "liberation" in Arabic.

Saudi Arabia has released an American woman it took into custody early this week after she tweeted and otherwise spoke out about her efforts to leave the country with her young Saudi-American daughter, according to a U.S. official and a U.S.-based advocacy group.

Carly Morris was released early Wednesday, after being summoned and taken into custody by Saudi authorities in the north-central city of Buraidah on Monday, according to the Freedom Initiative. The Washington-based group advocates for prisoners it deems wrongfully detained in the Middle East.