Middle East powerhouses Saudi Arabia and Iran have summoned Swedish diplomats to denounce Stockholm's permission for protests that desecrate the Quran on free speech grounds.

The separate moves by both majority-Muslim countries, announced in statements late Thursday, came amid heightened tensions between Sweden and Iraq over a Sweden-based Iraqi refugee who last month burnt pages of the Muslim religious text outside Stockholm's main mosque.

Egyptian researcher Patrick Zaki on Thursday walked out of prison, his family said, a day after President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi granted him a pardon in the wake of an international outcry.

Zaki's three-year prison sentence on Tuesday for "spreading false news" had prompted some participants to walk out of a government dialogue aimed at giving the opposition a voice.

As Jordan hosted regional talks this spring aimed at ending Syria's isolation after more than a decade of civil war, Syrian refugee Suzanne Dabdoob felt a deep pressure in her brain and in her ears, she said, a fear she hadn't felt since arriving to Jordan 10 years ago.

Ahead of the meeting, Syrian President Bashar Assad agreed that 1,000 Syrian refugees living in Jordan would be allowed to safely return home — a test case for the repatriation of far greater numbers. Jordan's top diplomat spoke only of voluntary returns. But panic spread through working-class east Amman, where Dabdoob and many other Syrians have built new lives in multistory, cement-block buildings.

An Israeli parliamentary committee has adopted a key clause of the hard-right government's controversial judicial reforms, a statement said Thursday, as protests intensified ahead of final votes on the bill.

Parliament's law committee approved the proposal, which would limit the "reasonability" clause that allows the judiciary to strike down government decisions, in a marathon debate that ended late on Wednesday.

Iraq's prime minister ordered the expulsion of the Swedish ambassador from Iraq and the withdrawal of the Iraqi charge d'affaires from Sweden on Thursday as a man desecrated of a copy of the Quran in Stockholm.

The diplomatic blowup came hours after protesters angered by the planned burning of a copy of the Quran stormed the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad, breaking into the compound and lighting a small fire.

Israeli troops shot and killed a Palestinian man near a shrine in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, Palestinian health officials said, in the latest bloodshed in a cycle of violence that has gripped the region.

The months of fighting with rising fatalities have shown no signs of abating and has become the worst violence between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank in nearly two decades.

Israeli airstrikes early Wednesday near Syria's capital Damascus killed three fighters loyal to President Bashar al-Assad's regime and wounded four others, a war monitor said.

Syrian state news agency SANA earlier reported two soldiers had been wounded in the overnight strikes. It quoted a military source as saying the bombing targeted "certain positions in the vicinity of Damascus."

The U.S. Congress prepared to welcome Israeli President Isaac Herzog Wednesday for a speech celebrating 75 years of Israeli independence, as a row over anti-Semitism highlighted fissures in Democratic Party support for the Middle Eastern ally.

An Egyptian court Tuesday sentenced rights researcher Patrick Zaki to three years' prison for "spreading false news", according to human rights defender Hossam Bahgat.

Bahgat, who runs the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights where Zaki works, said no appeal is possible against the conviction over an article Zaki wrote on discrimination against Coptic Christians.

President Joe Biden has invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to meet with him in the U.S. this fall, the White House said, even as he expressed ongoing concern about Netanyahu's controversial plans to overhaul his country's judicial system.

Monday's phone conversation between the U.S. and Israeli leaders came one day before Israel's figurehead president Isaac Herzog is set to visit to the White House and as Netanyahu's government pushes forward with the judicial changes that have sparked widespread protest in Israel.