The French military said Wednesday it would deploy three more fighter jets and a warship to the Middle East to boost support to Iraqi forces fighting Islamic State jihadists.

The warplanes will be sent to France's Al Dhafra military base in the United Arab Emirates, from where it has launched two rounds of air strikes as part of a U.S.-led coalition battling IS fighters.

A suicide car bomb blast ripped through a busy commercial street in a southeastern neighborhood of the Iraqi capital Wednesday, killing at least 14 people, police and medical sources said.

The attack occurred shortly after 5:30 pm (1430 GMT) in the Shiite-dominated district of Baghdad al-Jadida, on a street packed with restaurants as well as clothes and jewelry shops.

Israel is to press ahead with the planned construction of 2,610 settler homes in annexed east Jerusalem, a watchdog said Wednesday, with the move angering Palestinian leaders.

The housing units, which have been slated for construction since 2012 in the neighborhood of Givat Hamatos, were given final approval last week, Peace Now said in a statement.

Kurdish peshmerga forces on Wednesday were surrounding a clinic in Rabia where several Islamic State jihadists had holed up after their group lost control of the town, officials said.

The peshmerga launched a major military push Tuesday on Rabia, which lies on the border between Iraq and Syria, and quickly controlled most of it.

A skeptical Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday directly warned U.S. President Barack Obama not to accept any Iran deal that would allow Tehran to become a "threshold nuclear power."

Netanyahu and Obama renewed their often prickly relationship in the Oval Office, meeting for the first time since their governments swapped some of the harshest rhetoric in years over the Gaza crisis.

The Palestinians are asking the U.N. Security Council to set November 2016 as the deadline for ending the Israeli occupation, according to a draft resolution obtained by Agence France-Presse on Wednesday. 

The draft, circulated to council members, follows Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' address last week to the U.N. General Assembly in which he called for a fast-track to statehood.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressed the West on Wednesday to find a longterm solution to the crises in Syria and Iraq, saying dropping "tons of bombs" on Islamic State militants would only provide temporary respite.

Erdogan has pushed for the ousting of President Bashar Assad throughout the Syria crisis to settle the conflict and said that international action had to go well beyond air strikes.

An air strike on a base of the Islamic State jihadist group north of Baghdad killed nine militants Wednesday, a senior Iraqi military intelligence officer said.

The officer said a warplane from the international coalition against IS had destroyed a compound used by the organization in Danadish village, near the town of Hawijah.

Iraq's foreign minister said Wednesday that foreign assistance in the fight against the Islamic State jihadist group should respect the country's sovereignty.

He hailed the role played by Iran, which Kurdish officials said has been actively taking part in the fighting and still maintains a force on Iraqi territory.

France said Wednesday it will beef up its military deployment in the fight against Islamic State jihadists in Iraq being waged by a U.S.-led coalition.

"The president has decided to reinforce the military presence engaged" in the battle, said a statement from the presidency, without specifying what this would amount to.