Middle East News

David Cameron has arrived in Israel on his first visit as Prime Minister, vowing to add his weight to a US-led effort to rekindle the Middle East peace process.

DAMASCUS, Syria - In a rare public appearance, President Bashar Assad on Wednesday visited displaced Syrians in a frontline suburb of the country's capital, where he vowed to keep up the fight against gunmen whom he blamed for driving people from their homes, state TV said.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is visiting nearby Oman on his first trip to an Arab country since taking office last year.

Voters in a deeply divided Israeli city have returned an ultra-Orthodox mayor to his post after he narrowly defeated a secular challenger in a repeat vote held following fraud allegations.

Three suicide bombers detonated their explosives belts in a local administration building in a Kurdish town in northeastern Syria Tuesday, killing at least five people, the state-run news agency and a Kurdish official said.

HEBRON HILLS, West Bank a?? Preparing his jeep for the short drive into the West Bank city of Hebron, where tensions between Palestinians and Israeli settlers often flare, Nabeel Sabbagh looked like every other Israeli Border Policeman serving at this hilltop base.

Riot police fired tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets to disperse anti-government protesters hurling stones and bottles in central Ankara, the capital, and Istanbul, the largest city.

Hamas military wing members take part in a ceremony to inaugurate a monument marking the anniversary of the death of a senior Hamas official Ibrahim Maqadama, killed in an Israeli air strike in 2003, in Gaza City , Monday, March 10, 2014.

The official news agency of the United Arab Emirates says Egypt's military chief, Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, is in the country attending the closing ceremony of joint military exercises.

Israel expressed regret Tuesday over the killing of a Palestinian judge from Jordan, who was shot by Israeli soldiers at a border crossing, and promised Amman that it would carry out a joint investigation into his death.

On Monday, one Saudi man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for using Twitter to encourage protests and undermine the country's leadership, according to Saudi Arabian state news agency SPA.

Most of those a" 2.3 million Syrian children who should be in classes a" remain within Syria's borders, as education and health services collapse and classrooms are bombed or used as shelters and military barracks, UNICEF said in a new report that shows the tragically expanding effects of a conflict on the region's youngest victims.

The government faces a months-long crisis in Anbar province, where it has lost the city of Fallujah as well as shifting parts of provincial capital Ramadi to anti-government militants.

Shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek, young women and men sit next to each other while a thick film of cigarette smoke fills the dimly lit cafe in central Tehran.

Three northeastern provinces of Syria face an "alarming" food crisis, although access to relieve the impact of civil war has improved somewhat elsewhere, a U.N. aid agency said on Monday.

Turkey ordered the release of 19 men convicted of plotting a coup, days after an ex-military chief was freed in a case now entwined in a power struggle between Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and a U.S.-based Muslim cleric.

With the release of 13 Greek Orthodox nuns held hostage by the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front in Syria for over three months, here's a list of some other prominent people, including clerics, journalists and activists still missing in Syria and believed in the captivity of rebels.

Israel's military said Sunday that a cargo ship it intercepted in the Red Sea last week carried 40 rockets with a range of up to 160 kilometres .

Israeli guards shot and killed a Palestinian on Monday as he tried to grab a rifle from an Israeli soldier at the border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, the military said.

A suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives killed at least 34 people and wounded 121 others at a police checkpoint in the southern Iraqi city of Hilla, police officials said on Sunday.