Israel's defense minister has said that Israel's new government has greatly increased the number of strikes on Iranian targets since taking office late last year.

Yoav Gallant did not provide an exact number of airstrikes. But the address, delivered at a security conference, marked rare public comments on Israeli military activity in Syria.

A top Russian official who faces sanctions in the West over Moscow's war on Ukraine visited Saudi Arabia and held talks with his counterpart in the kingdom early on Tuesday, state media reported.

Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev's visit to Riyadh came just days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed an Arab League summit held in Saudi Arabia's Red Sea port city of Jeddah on Friday. The visits underline how the kingdom and Gulf Arab states, traditionally the security clients of the United States, have been maintaining their relations with Moscow amid the Ukraine war.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should be put on trial following "hundreds of thousands of deaths" and "chemical arms use" during the country's civil war, the French foreign minister said on Tuesday.

Asked during a television interview if she wanted Assad to be tried, Catherine Colonna said "the answer is yes", adding that "the battle against crime, against impunity is part of French diplomacy."

A Turkish drone strike in northern Iraq early Tuesday killed three Yazidi fighters and wounded three more, the counter-terrorism service of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region said.

"A Turkish army drone targeted a headquarters of the Sinjar Resistance Units," it said, referring to an armed group operating in the mainly Yazidi Sinjar district which has ties to the rebel Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) that has been waging a deadly insurgency against the Turkish state for four decades.

Emirati leaders extended a long-sought invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attend the U.N climate conference, known as COP28, in November.

The United Arab Emirates' President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum also invited Israel's figurehead President Isaac Herzog and dozens of other leaders including Syrian President Bashar Assad to COP28, in Dubai.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has returned to the Arab fold after more than a decade of isolation, eyeing reconstruction and aid from formers foes as the conflict grinds on.

Since the brutal civil war broke out in 2011, it has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and devastated much of the country's infrastructure and industry.

A house fire in Abu Dhabi killed six people and injured seven on Monday, according to the civil defense authority in the United Arab Emirates.

An Investigation is underway to find out the cause of the fire which erupted in the city's Al Moazaz area.

Turkey's presidential election is being anxiously watched by Kurds in Syria and Iraq as economic interests compete with fears of a regional military escalation against some Kurdish groups.

The long-running and deadly conflict between Ankara and militant groups from the ethnic Kurdish minority has spilled across the borders of both Iraq and Syria.

Saudi Arabia's first astronauts in decades rocketed toward the International Space Station on a chartered multimillion-dollar flight Sunday.

SpaceX launched the ticket-holding crew, led by a retired NASA astronaut now working for the company that arranged the trip from Kennedy Space Center. Also on board: a U.S. businessman who now owns a sports car racing team.

Three Palestinians were killed in an Israeli army raid in a West Bank refugee camp early on Monday, Palestinian health officials said, while the Biden administration sharply condemned Israel's latest act of settlement expansion.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, the three men were killed during a raid in Balata, a refugee camp near the city of Nablus. Six people were wounded, including one who was in critical condition, the ministry said.