Four crew members were killed, two of them Egyptian and two Emirati, when their military aircraft crashed during joint exercises on Wednesday, officials said.

The crash occurred in Egypt, the UAE's official news agency WAM said.

A top Emirati court on Tuesday sentenced 11 Islamists to up to life imprisonment for links to al-Qaida-affiliated militants as well as rebels in Syria, official media reported.

The Federal Supreme Court convicted them of bomb-making and of joining and financing al-Qaida franchise al-Nusra Front and Islamist rebel group Ahrar al-Sham, both in Syria.

Bahrain's Foreign Minister Khalid al-Khalifa blamed on Tuesday Hizbullah for the attack that killed a policeman in the town of Damistan, southwest of Manama.

"Another policeman falls martyr in Bahrain," he wrote on Twitter, adding: "He was killed by a bomb made by Hizbullah, the terrorist party".

A woman from the United Arab Emirates who stabbed a U.S. teacher to death at an Abu Dhabi shopping mall acted alone and targeted her victim randomly, a security source said Sunday.

The woman, who was arrested following last Monday's lone wolf attack and the planting of a makeshift bomb outside the home of an American doctor, had no links to "terrorist" organizations, the source told the official WAM news agency.

UAE authorities said Thursday they had arrested a woman for the "unprecedented" murder of an American teacher in a shopping center and a foiled plot to bomb a U.S. doctor's home.

Police said the suspect was a 38-year-old Emirati whom they have dubbed "The Reem Island Ghost" after the location of the mall where the attack by a suspect in a veil took place on Monday in the ladies toilets.

Sudan's foreign minister accused "foreign parties" of fueling fighting in Libya as he opened a meeting of neighboring countries Thursday aimed at ending more than three years of violence.

Libya has been gripped by lawlessness ever since the 2011 overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi and is awash with weapons left over from the NATO-backed uprising against his dictatorship. Rival governments and parliaments dispute power, with swathes of territory in the hands of powerful militia.

Human Rights Watch on Wednesday urged Saudi authorities to "immediately release" two women arrested after one of them attempted to drive into the kingdom in defiance of a ban.

Border officers stopped Loujain Hathloul when she tried to drive from neighbouring United Arab Emirates into Saudi Arabia on Sunday. Maysaa Alamoudi, a UAE-based Saudi journalist, later arrived to support her.

An American teacher and mother of twins was stabbed to death in a shopping center toilet in Abu Dhabi by a suspect in a Muslim veil, police said Wednesday.

It was unclear what the motive was for Monday's attack in the upmarket Boutik Mall on Al Reem Island, which is popular with expats.

As the wind whistles through gaping holes in her ruined house, 62-year-old Suad al-Zaza and her daughter huddle together for warmth on a bed made of a wooden door laid on breeze blocks.

"I wake up cold, I sleep on the bed, afraid that it will break. I'm covered with two blankets that we were given," she says as rain drips through the ceiling inside the wreckage of her home in Gaza City's Shejaiya neighbourhood. 

The French government said that six Mirage fighter jets would be deployed to Jordan on Thursday to assist in the fight against the Islamic State group.

Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told a weekly cabinet meeting that the deployment of the six fighters would "strengthen our presence in this theatre of operations," according to government spokesman Stephane Le Foll.