Muslim pilgrims have been streaming into Saudi Arabia's holy city of Mecca ahead of the start of the Hajj later this week, as the annual pilgrimage returns to its monumental scale.

Saudi officials say more than 1.5 million foreign pilgrims have arrived in the country by Tuesday, the vast majority by air, from across the world. More are expected, and hundreds of thousands of Saudis and others living in Saudi Arabia will also join them when the pilgrimage officially begins on Friday.

Yemen's Houthi rebels have launched a boat-borne bomb attack against a commercial ship in the Red Sea, authorities said, the latest escalation despite a U.S.-led campaign trying to protect the vital waterway.

The use of a boat loaded with explosives raised the specter of 2000's USS Cole attack, a suicide assault by al-Qaida on the warship when it was at port in Aden, killing 17 on board. Associated Press journalists saw the Cole in the Red Sea on Wednesday, now taking part in the U.S. campaign while visiting one of her sister ships, the USS Laboon.

At least 41 people died when a fire swept through a building that housed workers in Kuwait early Wednesday, and officials said the blaze appeared to be linked to code violations.

Interior Minister Sheikh Fahad Al-Yousuf Al-Sabah confirmed the toll and ordered the arrest of the building's owner during a visit to the site, local media reported.

For more than a decade, a steady flow of Syrians have crossed the border from their war-torn country into Lebanon. But anti-refugee sentiment is rising there, and in the past two months, hundreds of Syrian refugees have gone the other way.

They're taking a smugglers' route home across remote mountainous terrain, on motorcycle or on foot, then traveling by car on a risky drive through government-held territory into opposition-held northwestern Syria, avoiding checkpoints or bribing their way through.

Hezbollah on Wednesday said it fired dozens of rockets and shells at a military factory in Israel's Sa'sa', the Israeli army's northern headquarters in Ein Zeitim near Safad, a command center in Ami'ad near Tiberias, the Meron air control base near Lebanon's border, and the Zar'it barracks.

It said the major attack was in response to an overnight Israeli airstrike on the Tyre district town of Jwaya that killed senior Hezbollah commander Taleb Abdallah and three other fighters.

An Israeli strike on southern Lebanon killed a senior Hezbollah commander overnight Tuesday, the group said.

It named the commander as Taleb Abdallah, also known as Abu Taleb, born in 1969, in a statement reporting his death.

Hamas said Tuesday that it gave mediators its reply to the U.S.-backed proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza, seeking some "amendments" on the deal. It appeared the reply was short of an outright acceptance that the United States has been pushing for but kept negotiations alive over an elusive halt to the eight-month war.

The foreign ministries of Qatar and Egypt — who have been key mediators alongside the United States — confirmed that they had received Hamas' response and said mediators were studying it.

The resignation of a senior member of Israel's war Cabinet was a dramatic show of distrust in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his strategy for the eight-month-old war with Hamas.

But the departure of Benny Gantz does not immediately appear to threaten Netanyahu, who still controls a majority coalition in parliament.

Across the Chinese diaspora, racing in dragon boats has been a tradition reaching back thousands of years.

But change is afoot, most recently in central Taiwan where the races were switched to the evening to take advantage of cooler temperatures, a refreshing breeze and the sight of the boats lit up with LED lights running the length of the low-lying watercraft.

Oxford University has agreed to return a 500-year-old bronze sculpture of a Hindu poet and saint to India, the university's Ashmolean Museum said.

The Indian High Commission in the U.K. made a claim four years ago for the bronze figure of Tirumankai Alvar that was allegedly looted from a temple.