The airspace of war-torn Yemen was briefly closed Monday, an official said, as tensions escalated in the country's south after a separatist group, backed by the United Arab Emirates, took over of an oil-rich region in a rift that could fracture the anti-Houthi alliance.

A Yemeni government official said that the Saudi-led coalition didn't issue required permissions for flights to or from Yemen, briefly halting flights to and from the southern city of Aden — the seat of the internationally recognized government.

Israeli police forcibly entered the compound of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees in East Jerusalem early Monday, escalating a campaign against an organization that has been banned from operating on Israeli territory.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, said in a statement that "sizeable numbers" of Israeli forces including police on motorcycles, trucks and forklifts entered the compound in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and cut communications to the compound.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel and Hamas are "very shortly expected to move into the second phase of the ceasefire," after Hamas returns the remains of the last hostage held in Gaza.

Netanyahu spoke during a news conference with visiting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and stressed that the second phase, which addresses the disarming of Hamas and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, could begin as soon as the end of the month.

The United States, Israel and Qatar held a trilateral meeting in New York Sunday, a senior White House official told AFP, months after Israeli jets conducted an airstrike in Doha, unsuccessfully targeting Hamas leadership.

The White House official confirmed that the meeting had taken place but did not provide any further details.

As city after city fell to a lightning rebel offensive in Syria last December, Iranian forces and diplomats supporting Bashar al-Assad saw the writing on the wall, abandoning the longtime ruler days before his ousting, sources told AFP.

During Syria's civil war, which erupted in 2011 following the government's brutal repression of pro-democracy protests, Iran was one of Damascus' biggest backers, sending Assad military advisers and forces from its Revolutionary Guards.

A year ago, Mohammad Marwan found himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, out of Syria's notorious Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus as rebel forces pushing toward the capital threw open its doors to release the prisoners.

Arrested in 2018 for fleeing compulsory military service, the father of three had cycled through four other lockups before landing in Saydnaya, a sprawling complex just north of Damascus that became synonymous with some of the worst atrocities committed under the rule of now ousted President Bashar Assad.

Qatar and Egypt, guarantors of the Gaza ceasefire, called on Saturday for the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the deployment of an international stabilization force as the necessary next steps in fully implementing the fragile agreement.

The nearly two-month-old ceasefire in the Gaza Strip will not be complete until Israeli troops withdraw from the Palestinian territory under a peace plan backed by Washington and the U.N., mediator Qatar's prime minister said Saturday.

Remains that militants in Gaza handed to Israel were those of Thai agricultural worker Sudthisak Rinthalak, Israeli and Thai officials said Thursday. The confirmation brought the first phase of Gaza’s tenuous 8-week-old ceasefire a step closer to completion, with one more hostage’s remains still to be returned.

The subsequent phases under a U.S.-drafted, U.N.-backed plan for Gaza remain deeply uncertain. There has been no word on how provisions for Hamas’ disarmament will be carried out, or how a planned international administration and security force will be established.

A raid by U.S. forces and a local Syrian group aiming to capture an Islamic State group official instead killed a man who had been working undercover gathering intelligence on the extremists, family members and Syrian officials have told The Associated Press.