Complexes of McMansions, fast food restaurants, real estate offices and half-constructed high-rises line wide highways in Irbil, the seat of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

Many members of the political and business elite live in a suburban gated community dubbed the American Village, where homes sell for as much as $5 million, with lush gardens consuming more than a million liters of water a day in the summer.

A building collapsed Wednesday in Qatar's capital, killing at least one person as searchers clawed through the rubble to check for survivors, authorities said.

Qatar's Interior Ministry described the building as a four-story structure in Doha's Bin Durham neighborhood. It said rescuers found seven survivors, while the one person killed had been inside the building at the time of the collapse.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to back down on Wednesday, saying his government has "no intention" of returning to four abandoned settlements in the occupied West Bank under a law that was repealed by parliament this week.

His statement followed harsh U.S. criticism and an international uproar over Netanyahu's far-right government, the country's most hard-line ever, over the Knesset vote early Tuesday to revoke a 2005 law that dismantled the four settlements.

Muslim authorities in Saudi Arabia and several other Middle Eastern countries say this year's fasting month of Ramadan will begin Thursday based on the expected sighting of the crescent moon.

Clerics across the region said the moon was not visible Tuesday night, meaning it will almost certainly appear the following evening, heralding the start of the monthlong observance.

An Israeli airstrike early Wednesday targeted the international airport of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, causing material damage in the second attack on the facility this month, state media report.

State news agency SANA, quoting an unnamed military official, did not mention if the strike caused any deaths or injuries. It said warplanes fired the missiles toward Aleppo, Syria's largest city and once commercial center, while flying over the Mediterranean.

Israel's settler movement celebrated Tuesday after parliament annulled part of a law banning them from residing in areas of the occupied West Bank the then Israeli government evacuated in 2005.

That year the government of Ariel Sharon, a long-time settler champion turned peacemaker, oversaw a unilateral withdrawal by Israel from the Gaza Strip, and the removal of Jewish settlers from the Palestinian enclave and four settlements in the northern West Bank.

Thousands of angry Kurds rallied in rebel-held northern Syria on Tuesday after pro-Turkish fighters killed four fellow Kurds who were celebrating their Nowruz new year festival, an AFP correspondent reported.

"They killed my children for no reason," Kuli Maho, 70, told AFP as she wept for her three sons and grandson.

Qatar has sent 4,000 cabins built to house fans at last year's World Cup to earthquake survivors in Turkey and Syria, authorities said.

The Associated Press watched as the latest batch of pre-fabricated cabins was loaded onto a cargo ship in the Persian Gulf. The Qatar Development Fund began shipping cabins last month and says it will send a total of 10,000 to house people displaced by the Feb. 6 earthquake.

A commander of the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad killed in Syria in what the group described as an assassination by Israeli agents has been buried at a Palestinian refugee camp in the Syrian capital, Damascus.

His wife, speaking at the funeral, said the killers of 31-year-old Ali Ramzi al-Aswad used silencers. She said he had left their second-floor apartment in a Damascus suburb on Sunday morning, as he regularly did, and within less than a minute, she heard a crackling noise coming from the outside.

Saudi Arabia has freed a 72-year-old American citizen it had imprisoned for more than a year over old tweets critical of the kingdom's crown prince, his son said.

Neither Saudi nor U.S. officials immediately confirmed the release of Saad Almadi, a dual U.S.-Saudi citizen and, until his imprisonment in Saudi Arabia, a longtime retiree in Florida. There had been word since last week of progress toward Almadi's release.