Following the drubbing of U.S. President Donald Trump's Republican Party in the midterm elections, Iranians set fire to a giant poster featuring the American leader and his allies at a rally in Tehran.

In the capital's central Enghelab square, crowds gathered to observe the burning of the poster which also featured his Vice President JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemen's Houthis said on Thursday that a ballistic missile fired by the group at the Medina region -- home to one of Islam's holiest cities -- had been intercepted.

"Air defense intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile launched by the terrorist Houthi militia toward the Medina region," coalition spokesman Turki al-Malki said in a post on X.

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish party long aligned with Benjamin Netanyahu declined on Thursday to recommend him to stay as Israel's prime minister, as signs grew that rival Gadi Eisenkot will have the first chance to form a government.

President Isaac Herzog was holding a second day of consultations with political parties after the October 27 election, in which neither Netanyahu -- a polarizing right-winger who has led Israel through three years of war -- nor Eisenkot secured enough votes for a majority.

A veteran Arab lawmaker in Israel says his bloc is willing to break with decades of precedent and join forces with Jewish-led parties in a shared bid to end Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 's long rule.

"We want to do things that we did not do in the past in order to remove this criminal government," Ahmad Tibi, a senior member of the Arab Joint List, told The Associated Press.

The parliament in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region elected a speaker on Wednesday, more than two years after elections were held, with the chamber still riven by party divisions.

Israel's president on Wednesday urged political leaders to compromise in forming a government after an election he said had no clear winner and condemned "racist" rhetoric against Arab parties.

Iranian officials on Wednesday celebrated U.S. voters' rebuke of the Republican Party and President Donald Trump in the midterm elections, as the region waited to see how the results could affect the Iran war.

Concerns about the war's effects, particularly frustration over rising prices for fuel and other goods in the U.S., helped Democrats win control of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday's vote.

Iran's supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei said Wednesday that anyone expecting a shift in U.S. policy was "seriously mistaken", hours after midterm elections dealt a blow to President Donald Trump.

"Those who still harbor even the slightest hope that the behavior of the hegemonic system might change through partisan or factional shifts, or who imagine that making concessions to the United States can dissuade it from hostility towards the Iranian nation, are seriously mistaken," Khamenei said in a written statement published on his website.

Israel's election commission said Wednesday it has found no fraud in last week's vote, dealing a blow to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's attempts to discredit the results.

Netanyahu and his supporters have repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims that Arab-led parties had "stolen" the election, possibly with foreign assistance.

President Donald Trump says the U.S. will stop providing $4 billion in aid each year to Israel in 2027 but will sell arms to its closest ally in the Middle East.

The Republican president told Fox News Channel during a phone call on Tuesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had approached him about the idea and that they have been talking about it for a couple years.