A Saudi national convicted of murder was decapitated by the sword in the southwest of the Gulf kingdom on Tuesday, the interior ministry said.

Iraqi forces battled Sunni militants along a string of fronts on Tuesday, including at Saddam Hussein's hometown Tikrit, as the United Nations readied a massive aid operation for displaced Iraqis.

Kurdish and federal forces, who wrested back control of Iraq's largest dam, fought jihadists in the country's north, buoyed by intensifying U.S. air strikes and Western arms deliveries.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas will travel to Doha on Wednesday and hold talks the next day with the emir of Qatar and Hamas exiled leader Khaled Meshaal, the Palestinian ambassador in Qatar said.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Cairo faced a new midnight deadline Tuesday to end the bloodshed in Gaza after agreeing overnight to extend an existing truce by 24 hours.

News of the last-minute extension was confirmed by both sides shortly before a five-day ceasefire was to expire at midnight local time (2100 GMT Monday).

Washington and Damascus are "not on the same page" in the fight against their common enemy the Islamic State, whose militants have declared a "caliphate" straddling swathes of Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials said Monday.

The U.S. aviation regulator Monday ordered airlines based in the United States to stop flying over Syria, citing a "serious potential threat" to civil planes, including armed groups with anti-aircraft weapons.

"Based on an updated assessment of the risk associated with such operations and the lack of any requests from operators wishing to fly in this airspace, we believe it prudent to prohibit US operators from flying into, out of and over Syria," the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

President Barack Obama said Monday that the United States has embarked on a long-term mission to defeat the insurgents of the so-called "Islamic State" fighting in Iraq.

Ten days after ordering air strikes against the jihadist fighters, Obama warned that IS remains a threat to Iraq and the wider region, telling Baghdad "the wolf is at the door."

Human Rights Watch on Tuesday urged authorities in Iran to release immediately and unconditionally dozens of prisoners jailed in a northern city "for exercising their basic rights".

In a lengthy report, the New York-based body studied the cases of 189 people locked up in Karaj, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of the capital Tehran.

Syrian warplanes bombed positions belonging to the jihadist Islamic State group in the northern province of Raqa for a second day on Monday, a monitoring group said.

On Sunday, regime planes killed 31 jihadists and eight civilians in an unprecedented wave of aerial bombardment against the group in its Raqa bastion.

The United Nations is ready to check imports of construction material sent to Gaza in order to ease Israel's concerns that supplies could be used to rebuild Hamas tunnels, a U.N. envoy said Monday.

U.N. Mideast envoy Robert Serry told the U.N. Security Council that reconstruction of Gaza remained the main priority once a durable ceasefire is agreed between Hamas and Israel.