U.S.-backed forces were locked in fierce fighting as they pressed the battle against the last shred of the Islamic State group's "caliphate" in eastern Syria on Sunday, a war monitor said.

A Palestinian suspected of having killed a young Israeli woman has been arrested in a raid in the West Bank city of Ramallah, an Israeli police spokesman said on Saturday.

A Tunisian court has sentenced seven jihadists to life in prison over attacks at a museum and on a beach in 2015 that killed 60 people, many of them tourists, prosecutors said Saturday.

Nearly six years after the African Union shut it out in the cold, Egypt will take the organisation's helm  -- and strengthening multilateral powers is unlikely to be on the agenda.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was "not involved" in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and blaming him would be crossing "a red line," Saudi Arabia's minister of state for foreign affairs said Friday.

"For anyone to think that they can dictate what we should do, what our leadership should do, is preposterous," Minister Adel al-Jubeir told reporters in Washington, where many U.S. lawmakers have stated they believe Prince Mohammed is responsible for Khashoggi's killing last year at a Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

France's defense minister warned Friday in Baghdad that "the work is not over" in the fight against the Islamic State group, despite the jihadists facing the loss of their last scrap of territory.

Kurdish officials told AFP on Friday there was no progress on repatriating dozens of French nationals, including accused Islamic State fighters, women, and children, from prison camps in northern Syria.

Human Rights Watch urged Moroccan authorities on Friday to free a man handed jail time for calling for protests over the navy's shooting dead of a 22-year-old student.

A Tunisian court was holding final hearings Friday in two trials over jihadist attacks in 2015 on a museum and a tourist resort that left dozens dead, lawyers told AFP.

The Turkish fiancee of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi said Friday she hoped pressure from the U.S. Congress would encourage the Trump administration to take a tougher stance on the killing.