Lawmakers from Hamas and those affiliated with a former Gaza strongman have met for the first time in a decade in Gaza's parliament building.

Thursday's meeting was the latest sign that an emerging Gaza power-sharing deal between the territory's Hamas rulers and Mohammed Dahlan, a former leader in the rival Fatah party, is moving forward.

U.S.-backed Syrian fighters have captured almost half of Raqqa from the Islamic State group, but the push into the northern city has slowed due to large amounts of explosives planted by the extremists and their counteroffensives, a spokeswoman for the fighters and a monitoring group said Thursday.

The assault on Raqqa by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led fighting coalition, began June 6, backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and U.S. troops advising the local forces. Since then, the SDF has made steady advances from the eastern and western sides of the city reaching the walled old quarter.

The Trump administration is pushing for inspections of suspicious Iranian military sites in a bid to test the strength of the nuclear deal that President Donald Trump desperately wants to cancel, senior U.S. officials said.

The inspections are one element of what is designed to be a more aggressive approach to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. While the Trump administration seeks to police the existing deal more strictly, it is also working to fix what Trump's aides have called "serious flaws" in the landmark deal that — if not resolved quickly — will likely lead Trump to pull out.

Russia says the United States and its Western allies rushed to judgment and blamed the Syrian government for using sarin nerve gas in an attack on an opposition-held town in Syria without ever visiting the site and ignoring two witnesses presented by Damascus.

It also criticized the report by the fact-finding mission from the chemical weapons watchdog that investigated the incident in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 which killed more than 90 people, calling it "very biased."

U.S. President Donald Trump has given the impression that he is not up to speed on who's fighting whom in Lebanon.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has urged the U.N. Security Council to consider Hizbullah "a destructive terrorist force" and "a major obstacle to peace" that is "dedicated to the destruction of Israel."

She said the council must get serious about enforcing its resolutions that involve Hizbullah and its backer Iran, including many calling on the armed group to disarm.

U.S. President Donald Trump called Hizbullah a threat to Lebanon and the entire Middle East on Tuesday, accusing it and Iran of fueling a humanitarian disaster in Syria.

Syrian rebels and activists are warning that an al-Qaida-linked jihadi group is on the verge of snuffing out what remains of the country's uprising in northwestern Syria, after the extremists seized control of the opposition-held regional capital, Idlib, last weekend.

With the jihadis cementing their authority over the city and its province, also called Idlib, Syrian President Bashar Assad has been supplied with a useful pretext for a long-expected assault against the rebellious province: that the uprising against him is largely driven by Islamists and terrorists.

In the wake of victory against the Islamic State group in Mosul, Iraq's political, religious and military leaders are debating the future of the country's powerful Shiite militias — the tens of thousands of men who answered a religious call to arms three years ago and played a critical role in beating back the extremists.

Some are demanding the mostly Iranian-backed forces be disbanded but the militias say their sacrifices on the battlefield and the fact they were sanctioned by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi have earned them a permanent place in the hierarchy of Iraq's security forces.

Donald Trump's son-in-law and top White House advisor Jared Kushner forcefully denied colluding with Moscow to sway the 2016 election Monday, insisting a string of undisclosed meetings with Russian officials were "proper."

"Let me be very clear -- I did not collude with Russia, nor do I know of anyone else in the campaign who did so,"  Kushner said after giving testimony to a Congressional inquiry.