If Saudi Arabia could have designed a process for choosing future World Cup hosts, it might look similar to what FIFA unveiled this week for the 2030 and 2034 men's soccer tournaments.

The Saudi Arabian soccer federation became the favored — and possibly only — candidate to host the biggest event in the world's favorite sport in 2034.

Israeli troops have killed three Palestinian gunmen in West Bank violence on Thursday, Palestinian health officials said, in the latest deaths in a monthslong surge of violence in the occupied territory.

In video circulated on social media, a lone gunman opened fire at an Israeli car in broad daylight on a busy street in Hawara, a flashpoint town in the northern West Bank. The gunman fired at least 10 shots, pursuing the car as it tried to escape by driving over a barrier in the middle of the street.

Turkish warplanes have carried out airstrikes on sites believed to be used by U.S.-backed Kurdish militant groups in northern Syria after the U.S. military shot down an armed Turkish drone that came within 500 meters (yards) of American troops.

A Turkish defense ministry statement said the Turkish jets targeted some 30 sites in the Tal Rifat, Jazeera and Derik regions, destroying caves, bunkers, shelters and warehouses used by Kurdistan Workers' Party, PKK, or its affiliated Kurdish militia group in Syria, which is known as People's Defense Units, or YPG.

An attack Thursday on a Syrian military academy killed 112 people, a war monitor said, with state media blaming "terrorist organisations" for the drone strike in government-held Homs.

Separately, Turkish air raids in the country's Kurdish-held northeast killed at least 11 people, according to Kurdish forces, after Ankara had threatened retaliation for a bomb attack.

At least seven Syrian security personnel were killed and more than 20 wounded Thursday when a drone attack targeted a military academy in Homs province, a war monitor said.

"Seven dead and more than 20 regime officers wounded in a violent explosion in the area of the military academy in Homs, caused by an attack by drones during a graduation ceremony," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Israel is a nation perennially swept up in religious fervor and conflict. And yet, strikingly, a large portion of its population is secular, and even its insular ultra-Orthodox community loses a steady stream of members who tire of its strict religious rules.

The country is home to about 7 million Jews, almost half of the global Jewish population. But Jewish identity is a complex blend of religious and ethnonational identity; most Israeli Jews are not diligent observers of Judaism.

Israel has quietly helped fuel Azerbaijan's campaign to recapture Nagorno-Karabakh, supplying powerful weapons to Azerbaijan ahead of its lightening offensive last month that brought the ethnic Armenian enclave back under its control, officials and experts say.

Just weeks before Azerbaijan launched its 24-hour assault on Sept. 19, Azerbaijani military cargo planes repeatedly flew between a southern Israeli airbase and an airfield near Nagorno-Karabakh, according to flight tracking data and Armenian diplomats, even as Western governments were urging peace talks.

The role of sectarian divisions in fueling conflicts in Lebanon is one reason Talar Demirdjian distanced herself from religion.

"People either go very into their religion or their sects, or the other side." A Lebanese Armenian of Christian heritage, Demirdjian said about religion, "I don't even think about it enough to tick a label."

Israeli forces killed two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, the Palestinian health ministry said as the Israeli army reported soldiers were engaged in a shootout.

The health ministry said two men were killed by "occupation (Israeli) bullets near Tulkarem" in the northern West Bank. They were named as Abdul Rahman Atta, 23, and Huthaifa Faris, 27.

Turkish strikes Thursday on military and infrastructure targets in Kurdish-held northeastern Syria killed at least nine people, Kurdish security forces said, after Ankara had threatened raids in retaliation for a bomb attack.

While Turkey regularly carries out drone attacks in Syrian Kurds' semi-autonomous region, Ankara on Wednesday warned of more intense cross-border air raids, after concluding that militants who staged a weekend attack in the Turkish capital came from Syria.