Egypt has blocked access to the website of media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, adding RSF to a growing list of restricted online sites in the North African country.

Gunmen killed seven family members of an Iraqi police officer, including a teenage son, in a pre-dawn attack Friday on their home near the northern city of Kirkuk, security officials told AFP.

Israel's Supreme Court has frozen implementation of a law legalising dozens of Jewish settlements built on private Palestinian land, which the UN labelled a "thick red line".

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says in a draft report that the Saudi-led coalition was responsible for more than half the children killed and injured in Yemen's civil war last year.

The report, obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, said the United Nations verified 1,340 casualties and attributed 683 — representing 51 percent — to attacks carried out by the coalition.

The United Arab Emirates will provide $15 million a month to Gaza, a Palestinian politician said Thursday, as its rulers Hamas move closer to a UAE-based rival to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

The Qatari foreign minister on Thursday welcomed Saudi Arabia's decision to reopen the two countries' border to Muslim pilgrims, while lashing out at Riyadh's "politicisation" of religious freedoms.

Syria's opposition has lost one of its most powerful factions with the collapse of Islamist heavyweight Ahrar al-Sham, which once walked a fine line between jihadists and more mainstream rebels.

Israeli forces blew up the West Bank home of a Palestinian who took part in an attack in Jerusalem in which a policewoman was killed, the army said Thursday.

Iraq has asked the UN to assist it with gathering evidence of crimes committed by the Islamic State group and said it was working with Britain to draft a Security Council resolution to establish an investigation.

A suicide bomber killed a Hamas guard in southern Gaza on Thursday, officials said, in what was seen as a rare Islamist attack against the Palestinian group that has run the impoverished enclave for a decade.

The incident occurred at around 1:00 am near the Gaza Strip's lone crossing with Egypt along the Sinai Peninsula, where radical Islamists are waging an insurgency against Egyptian forces.