A homicide investigation was opened on Monday after a security guard at the Qatari Embassy in Paris was killed and a suspect arrested, the prosecutor's office said.

The circumstances of the killing, including the method used, were not immediately clear. The prosecutor's office said that "the use of a weapon is not at this time confirmed."

Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi arrived in Oman on Monday with trade deals on the agenda and as international talks on Tehran's nuclear program hang in the balance.

Raisi, on his second Gulf visit since taking office in August, was greeted by Sultan Haitham bin Tareq at the airport and received a 21-gun salute at the royal palace, an Omani statement said.

Iraq closed airports and public buildings on Monday as another sandstorm -- the ninth since mid-April -- hit the country, authorities said.  

The capital Baghdad was enveloped in a giant dust cloud that left usually traffic-choked streets largely deserted, an AFP correspondent said. 

Six Palestinians have been sentenced to an additional five years in jail for a 2021 escape through a tunnel from a prison in northern Israel, their lawyers told Israeli media. 

The six, already serving life terms for anti-Israeli attacks, escaped on September 6 last year from Gilbao prison through a tunnel dug under a sink.

Israeli surface-to-surface missiles killed three people near the Syrian capital Damascus on Friday, state media said quoting a military source.

Sandstorms have engulfed the Middle East in recent days, in a phenomenon experts warn could proliferate because of climate change, putting human health at grave risk.

At least 4,000 people went to hospital Monday for respiratory issues in Iraq where eight sandstorms have blanketed the country since mid-April.

Weeks of Israeli raids and clashes with Palestinians have filled residents of the flashpoint Jenin refugee camp with fear and anxiety, and a longing to "live in dignity".

A hub of armed Palestinian groups, the Jenin area in the north of the occupied West Bank has been targeted by Israeli raids time and again since a wave of anti-Israeli attacks in late March.

Egyptian authorities have transferred a prominent political activist from a maximum-security prison where he was allegedly tortured and denied basic rights to a new correctional facility, his family said.

Alaa Abel-Fattah was transferred from Cairo's Tora prison complex to Wadi El-Natrun prison in the north of the country, where he was visited on Thursday by his family, his sister Mona Seif wrote on Twitter.

Jordan's king has gone public with a royal rift with his half-brother and formalized the former crown prince's house arrest, calling him "erratic" in an unprecedented harshly worded letter published Thursday.

King Abdullah II said in the letter that he had approved measures to detain Prince Hamzah in his palace and restrict his communications and movements, citing his half brother's "erratic behavior and aspirations."

Former President George W. Bush is facing criticism after mistakenly describing the invasion of Iraq — which he led as commander in chief — as "brutal" and "wholly unjustified," before correcting himself to say he meant to refer to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean of Ukraine," Bush said Wednesday night during a speech at his presidential center in Dallas.