Australian police are investigating a "suspicious fire" after a car carrying a sign celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanukkah was set ablaze Thursday in Melbourne.

A former Syrian intelligence officer who was close to one of ousted ruler Bashar al-Assad's top army commanders was killed in Lebanon, a judicial official said, with the army announcing it had arrested a suspect.

Lebanese authorities are investigating the recent disappearance of a retired security officer whose brother was allegedly involved in the 1986 capture of an Israeli air force navigator, a Lebanese judicial official told AFP.

Damascus' foreign and defense ministers met Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday during a visit to Moscow where they discussed military cooperation, Syrian state media said.

The Israeli army said Wednesday that it had identified a Hamas financial official it killed two weeks ago in a strike in the Gaza Strip.

The U.N. rights chief on Tuesday criticized the detention of dozens of U.N. staff by Yemen's Houthis, calling on the Houthi authorities to release them "immediately and unconditionally".

"My colleagues in Yemen remain arbitrarily detained -- one since Nov 2021, subjected to ill-treatment, facing fabricated espionage charges for his human rights work," Volker Turk said on X, calling on the Houthi authorities "to release our human rights & humanitarian workers immediately & unconditionally".

London police on Tuesday arrested Swedish activist Greta Thunberg at a demonstration in support of pro-Palestinian hunger strikers, Palestinian activist groups said.

"Greta Thunberg was arrested under the Terrorism Act at the Prisoners for Palestine lock-on protest," Prisoners for Palestine said in a statement.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday said his government would invite Israel's president to visit, after a mass shooting in Sydney targeting the Jewish community.

"Prime Minister Albanese advised President (Isaac) Herzog that, upon the recommendation of the Australian government, the Governor-General of Australia will issue an invitation in accordance with protocol to President Herzog to visit Australia as soon as possible," said a post on the leader's X account.

The Israeli army on Tuesday claimed that a Lebanese soldier killed in a drone strike on a car in the Sidon district was also a Hezbollah operative.

It claimed the strike killed three Hezbollah members in total, “including one who served concurrently in the Lebanese Army's intelligence unit and another who was working with an air defense unit (belonging to Hezbollah) in the Sidon area.”

Israeli bulldozers tore through a four-storey building in east Jerusalem on Monday, leaving scores of Palestinian residents unsure where to go after their doors were broken down in the middle of the night by authorities enforcing hasty evictions.

The building was the latest in a series of residential structures to be razed as Israeli officials target what they describe as unauthorized construction in the city's annexed east -- a campaign that local Palestinian officials characterized as a "systematic policy" to displace residents.