Israel's foreign minister has said that Israel would not cave in to foreign dictates on its treatment of the Palestinians — in comments that came in a meeting with his Norwegian counterpart coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the Oslo peace accords.

The remarks by Foreign Minister Eli Cohen underscored the deterioration of Mideast peace efforts since the historic interim peace deal. Substantive negotiations have not taken place in years, and Israel is led by a far-right government opposed to Palestinian statehood.

With attention focused on its contentious judicial overhaul, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has quietly taken unprecedented steps toward cementing Israel's control over the occupied West Bank — perhaps permanently.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a leader of the settlement movement, assumed new powers over the occupied territory in his coalition agreement with Netanyahu. Smotrich moved swiftly to approve thousands of new settlement homes, legalize previously unauthorized wildcat outposts and make it more difficult for Palestinians to build homes and move about.

Israeli airstrikes have killed two Syrian soldiers and wounded six others on Syria's west coast, state media said, quoting a military source.

"At exactly 17:22 (1422 GMT) this (Wednesday) afternoon, the Israeli enemy carried out strikes... from the direction of the Mediterranean Sea targeting some of our air defense sites in Tartus," the official news agency SANA quoted the source as saying.

The stench of death wafted through the village of Imi N'Tala high up in Morocco's Atlas Mountains four days after a deadly earthquake struck, slicing off a chunk of mountain, killing residents and razing the hamlet to the ground.

Bulldozers, rescue crews and Moroccan first responders work around the clock trying to dig through the wreckage to unearth the eight to ten corpses still underneath.

International aid groups have mobilized in Morocco, where a 6.8 magnitude earthquake Friday night has killed 2,681 and injured more than 2,500, and Libya, where thousands are reported dead and more than 10,000 still missing from weekend flooding. Donors, both big and small, are also mobilizing to support those relief efforts.

Experts say the most direct way to provide aid to those affected in both countries is to donate to organizations that already have operations on the ground in those countries.

Hundreds of prisoners suspended their monthlong hunger strike in Bahrain, just ahead of a visit of the island nation's crown prince to the United States.

The strike will pause until Sept. 30 as some prisoners suffered health problems and to see if promised changes by Bahrain's government at the Jaw Rehabilitation and Reform Center will materialize, according to the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, an advocacy group.

The text-message alert came in the middle of the night: A massive earthquake had hit Morocco. French volunteers scrambled to pull together a nine-person search-and-rescue team, listening devices and other gear to look for people buried under rubble.

The only thing the French aid workers didn't have was a green light from Morocco to hop on a flight, which could have landed them in the North African country's disaster zone little more than 24 hours after the Sept. 8 quake that killed more than 2,900 people and injured at least 5,530 others in flattened villages and townhouses.

Thousands of Israeli academics and artists have urged U.S. President Joe Biden and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to shun Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to the United States next week, underlining the divide between Israel's far-right government and segments of the country's population.

In an open letter published Wednesday, over 3,500 signers, including well-known Israeli writer David Grossman and painter Tamar Getter, called on Biden and Guterres not to meet with Netanyahu or invite him to speak at the U.N. General Assembly's yearly meeting of world leaders.

A storm that has killed thousands of people and left thousands more missing in Libya is the latest blow to a country that has been gutted by years of chaos and division.

The floods are the most fatal environmental disaster in the country's modern history. Years of war and lack of a central government have left it with crumbling infrastructure that was vulnerable to the intense rains. Libya is currently the only country yet to develop a climate strategy, according to the United Nations.

The death toll from flooding that hit the eastern Libyan city of Derna reached more than 5,000 and was expected to rise further, a local health official said Wednesday, as authorities struggled to get aid to the coastal city where thousands remained missing and tens of thousands were homeless.

Aid workers who managed to reach the city, which was cut off Sunday night when flash floods washed away most of the access roads, described devastation in the city's center, where search and rescue teams combed shattered apartment buildings for bodies and retrieved floating bodies offshore.