Yemen's exiled president stepped aside and transferred his powers to a presidential council on Thursday, as international and regional efforts to end the country's long-running civil war gained momentum with a two-month truce.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, major players in the conflict appear to have played a role in President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi's decision, quickly welcoming it with a pledge of $3 billion in aid. The head of the new council has close ties to Riyadh.

A Turkish court ruled Thursday to suspend the trial in absentia of 26 Saudis accused in the gruesome killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and for the case to be transferred to Saudi Arabia.

Kaghoggi, a United States resident who wrote for the Washington Post, was killed on Oct. 2, 2018, at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where he had gone for an appointment to collect documents required for him to marry his Turkish fiancee, Hatice Cengiz. He never emerged from the building.

Tunisia has summoned Turkey's ambassador in protest against "interference", the foreign ministry said Wednesday, after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized his counterpart in Tunis for dissolving the country's parliament.

President Kais Saied sacked the assembly last week, eight months after suspending it and seizing wide-ranging powers in a decisive blow against the democratic system born out of the country's 2011 uprising, which sparked the Arab Spring.

Digital-rights researchers have concluded that the mobile phones of four Jordanian human rights activists were hacked over a two-year period with software made by the Israeli spyware company NSO Group.

Tuesday's findings by Front Line Defenders and Citizen Lab said at least some of the hackings appear to have been carried out by the Jordanian government. It was the latest in a series of reports linking NSO's Pegasus spyware software to abuses by authoritarian governments.

Israel will allow women, children and men over 40 from the West Bank to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Friday in an apparent bid to help calm tensions during the holy month of Ramadan.

The government said in a statement that it could further relax restrictions if things stay quiet. The use of incentives around the flashpoint shrine, built on a hilltop compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount, comes a year after flare-ups led to the Israel-Gaza war in May.

The United Arab Emirates has sentenced an Israeli woman to death for cocaine possession, in a major test of new relations between the Mideast countries.

Israel's Foreign Ministry confirmed that it is working on the case of the woman, identified by her lawyer as Fida Kiwan. News reports said she is a 43-year-old Haifa resident who owns a photography studio. She was sentenced on Monday, said attorney Tami Olman.

An Israeli lawmaker quit the government's wafer-thin ruling coalition over a religious dispute on Wednesday, throwing the fragile alliance into disarray without a majority in parliament.

Backbencher Idit Silman's departure raises the possibility of new parliamentary elections less than a year after the government took office. While Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's government remains in power, it is now hamstrung in the 120-seat parliament and will likely struggle to function.

The U.S. military could have done more to limit civilian casualties and damage during the battle for the Syrian city of Raqqa that marked the Islamic State's fall in 2017, according to a report commissioned by the Pentagon.

At the end of the nearly five-month battle to free the city from IS, "60 to 80 percent" of it was "uninhabitable" and resentment of the population was directed at the liberators, said a report by the research center RAND Corporation. 

Kuwait's government resigned on Tuesday, three months after it was sworn in, state media reported, amid escalating disputes with parliament.

The Gulf emirate's prime minister, Sabah Khaled Al-Sabah, submitted the cabinet's resignation to Crown Prince Sheikh Meshal al-Ahmad al-Jaber Al-Sabah, the official KUNA news agency said.

Yemen's warring parties on Tuesday traded accusations of violating a ceasefire agreement, three days after it went into effect at the start of Ramadan.

The internationally recognized government, supported by a Saudi-led military coalition, and the Iran-backed Huthi rebels have been locked in a violent power struggle since 2014, when the insurgents seized the capital Sanaa.