Hamas officials told AFP that search operations for the remains of the last Israeli hostage held in Gaza resumed on Wednesday after a two-week pause due to bad weather.

Israel has previously said it is awaiting the return of Ran Gvili's body before beginning talks on the second phase of the fragile ceasefire agreement with Hamas which came into effect in October.

Israel has cleared the final hurdle before starting construction on a contentious settlement project near Jerusalem that would effectively cut the West Bank in two, according to a government tender.

The tender, which seeks bids from developers, would clear the way to begin construction of the E1 project.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged calm after a bus driver ran over and killed a teenage boy Tuesday night during a protest in Jerusalem against a law seeking to draft the ultra-Orthodox community into Israel's military.

"I call for restraint to prevent the mood from becoming further inflamed so that, heaven forbid, we do not have additional tragedies," Netanyahu said in a statement early Wednesday, adding that the death would be thoroughly investigated.

The United Nations said on Wednesday that decades of discrimination and segregation of Palestinians in the West Bank by Israel were intensifying and creating a kind of "apartheid system".

Rights chief Volker Turk said there was "a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank", creating a "particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation, that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before".

A council fighting against Yemen's Houthi rebels said Wednesday that it had expelled the leader of a separatist movement and charged him with treason after he reportedly declined to travel to Saudi Arabia for talks.

The latest upheaval in southern Yemen is revealing a growing divide among the Persian Gulf powers, cracking the coalition fighting the Iran-aligned Houthis. Longstanding differences between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — from Sudan to energy policy — have spilled into Yemen, where they back rival factions. The rift has deepened strains between the two neighbors, who officially share the goal of countering the Houthis, in control of the capital, Sanaa, since 2014.

Clashes broke out Wednesday in Syria's northern city of Aleppo after hundreds of people left two predominantly ethnic Kurdish neighborhoods when the military opened two corridors for civilians to leave the area that witnessed deadly violence a day earlier.

Syria's military gave people until 3 p.m. (1200 GMT) to leave the neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Achrafieh, after which they would be considered a "closed military area." Once the deadline ended, sounds of explosions were heard in the two neighborhoods.

The deadliest clashes so far broke out Tuesday between Syrian government forces and Kurdish fighters in a contested area of the northern city of Aleppo, as efforts to merge the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces with the national army have shown little progress.

Syria 's state-run SANA news agency said a soldier was killed and three others were wounded in an attack by the SDF. State TV later reported that three civilians, including two women, were killed and others were wounded, including two children, in shelling of a residential area that it blamed on the SDF. SANA also said nine Aleppo Directorate of Agriculture employees were wounded by SDF shelling that hit its office.

By Kamran Talattof, University of Arizona

A familiar slogan has echoed through the streets of various Iranian cities in recent days: "Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran."

Hundreds of tourists are stuck on the Yemeni island of Socotra after flights were halted over clashes on the mainland, two officials and a travel agency told AFP Monday.

The island's deputy governor for culture and tourism, Yahya bin Afrar, told AFP: "We have more than 400 foreign tourists... their flights have been suspended." Another local government official gave a similar figure.

Syrian and Israeli officials are set to resume U.S.-mediated talks in Paris in hopes of reaching a security agreement to defuse tensions between the two countries, a Syrian official said Monday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Associated Press that the delegation on the Syrian side will be headed by Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani and the head of the General Intelligence Directorate, Hussein Salameh.