An Israeli court on Tuesday jailed for 15-and-a-half years a Palestinian caught fighting in Gaza during last summer's 50-day war between Israel and Hamas.

A transcript of proceedings in the Beersheba district court, in southern Israel, said that Mohammed Abu Zaraj, born in 1991, was one of a squad of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas' military wing, lying in ambush for advancing Israeli troops on July 27. 

Al-Qaida's Syrian affiliate and Islamist factions launched a multi-front offensive Tuesday against the regime-held northwestern city of Idlib, a monitor and activists said.

"The attack has started from several directions, there are fierce battles," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

An Israeli cabinet minister visiting Paris warned Tuesday against concluding a "bad accord" on Iran's nuclear program, telling French daily Le Monde his country shares France's wariness of trusting Tehran.

"We believe it would be a bad accord with severe gaps in it," said Israeli Intelligence Minister Youval Steinitz, who met French President Francois Hollande's diplomatic adviser on Monday.

The Islamic State group has trained more than 400 children in Syria as fighters in 2015 alone, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said Tuesday.

Calling them "Cubs of the Caliphate," the jihadist group provides intense military and religious training to children throughout its areas of control in Syria, the Britain-based monitor said. 

Al-Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc on Tuesday accused the March 8 forces of waging a “political media campaign” against its chief, MP Fouad Saniora, over his testimony at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague.

In a statement issued after its weekly meeting, the bloc said Saniora has so far demonstrated “all the circumstances that Lebanon was going through prior to the assassination” of former premier Rafik Hariri, and the impact of “the oppressive interferences that were practiced by the Lebanese-Syrian security apparatus and its tools in Lebanon and Syria.”

Senegal's former president Abdoulaye Wade called for a mass rally on Friday over the sentencing of his son for graft as his lawyers said they had filed an appeal.

Karim Wade, who was being groomed to succeed his father in the top job, got a six-year jail term on Monday after judges ruled he was guilty of "illegal enrichment" and fined him the equivalent of more than 210 million euros ($230 million).

Human Rights Watch criticized Oman Tuesday for refusing to grant a rights activist bail pending an appeal of his conviction using the Internet to sow unrest in the normally stable sultanate.

Blogger Saeed Jaddad, 48, was jailed this month for three years on charges of undermining the status and prestige of the state, inciting rallies via social media ahead of the anniversary of February 2011 protests and calling for what could undermine public order.

Syrians increasingly feel forsaken by the rest of the world, after four years of war that has killed nearly a quarter-million people, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday.

In a report on the worsening humanitarian crisis in Syria, Ban said the devastation from the fighting has left around 7.6 million people internally displaced.

The Change and Reform parliamentary bloc stressed Tuesday the need to maintain the work of state institutions amid the presidential void, warning that the country might lose foreign loans and donations that have been put on hold due to the political crisis.

“The bloc stressed the need to maintain the work of state institutions and to exert efforts to prevent their paralysis, especially regarding the necessary and essential matters which affect all Lebanese,” MP Ibrahim Kanaan announced after the bloc's weekly meeting in Rabieh.

Speaker Nabih Berri distributed on Tuesday the agenda of an upcoming legislative session on the members of the parliament's bureau.

MP Marwan Hamadeh stated after meeting Berri at his Ain el-Tineh residence that the speaker took his decision out of the need for “urgent legislation.”