The Suez Canal Authority said Monday that a cargo ship carrying corn that went aground in the Egyptian waterway was refloated and canal traffic was restored.

Canal services firm Leth Agencies said the vessel, MV Glory, ran aground near the city of Qantara, in the Suez Canal province of Ismailia. The firm said three canal tugboats had been working to refloat the vessel.

Thousands of Israelis have protested against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new government, regarded as the most right-wing in Israeli history, an AFP correspondent said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new government is little more than a week old but it's already giving the Biden administration headaches.

Just days into its mandate, a controversial member of Netanyahu's right-wing Cabinet riled U.S. diplomats with a visit to a Jerusalem holy site that some believe may be harbinger of other contentious moves, including vast expansions of Jewish settlement construction on land claimed by the Palestinians.

Arab-Israeli Karim Younis, hailed by supporters as the "dean of Palestinian prisoners", said Thursday he was proud after being released from 40 years behind bars for killing a soldier.

With a black and white keffiyeh wrapped around his shoulders, 64-year-old Younis was met by hundreds of supporters singing the Palestinian national anthem in his home village of Ara in northern Israel.

Iran announced Thursday the closure of a Tehran-based French research institute in protest against cartoons of the Islamic republic's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei published by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

"The ministry is ending the activities of the French Institute for Research in Iran as a first step," the Iranian foreign ministry said in a statement, a day after Tehran had warned Paris of consequences.

The Israeli army killed a Palestinian boy Thursday in the West Bank city of Nablus, the Palestinian health ministry said, where armed clashes broke out between militants and Israeli forces.

The health ministry announced "Amer Abu Zeitoun, 16, was killed by a bullet in the head fired by the occupation (Israeli) soldiers during the aggression on Nablus at dawn today".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's justice minister has unveiled the new government's long-promised overhaul of the judicial system that aims to weaken the country's Supreme Court.

Critics accused the government of declaring war against the legal system, saying the plan will upend Israel's system of checks and balances and undermine its democratic institutions by giving absolute power to the most right-wing coalition in the country's history.

The United Arab Emirates' top diplomat has met with Syrian President Bashar Assad, his second visit to Damascus as relations continue to thaw between the two countries.

According to a statement from Assad's office, he and UAE's Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan discussed boosting economic ties between their nations. It quoted Assad as saying that the restoration of ties between the two countries is in the interest of regional stability.

The Israeli military has demolished homes, water tanks and olive orchards in two Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank where some residents are at risk of imminent expulsion, residents and activists said Wednesday.

One of the villages whose structures were demolished on Tuesday is part of an arid area of the West Bank known as Masafer Yatta, which the Israeli military has designated as a live-fire training zone. Some 1,000 residents of the eight hamlets that make up Masafer Yatta are slated for expulsion, an order Israel's Supreme Court upheld in May after a two-decade legal battle.

Palestinian lawyer and activist Salah Hammouri vowed to keep up his fight for the rights of the Palestinian people despite his deportation to France following Israel's claim that he has ties to a banned militant group.

Hammouri, who holds French citizenship, landed in Paris on Dec. 18 following months of legal wrangling, despite France's public opposition to the expulsion.