A Palestinian court on Thursday postponed municipal elections set for October 8 following disputes between the rival Fatah and Hamas movements over candidate lists, jeopardizing the first vote since 2006 to involve both parties.

The decision was made by the high court in Ramallah in the West Bank, where Fatah is in power. 

A spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Thursday dismissed a claim by researchers that he worked as a Soviet agent in Damascus in the 1980s, calling it a smear intended to derail a Russian peace initiative.

The claim emerged in a report by Israeli public television on Wednesday night citing two researchers who were studying the so-called Mitrokhin papers stored in Britain at Cambridge University's Churchill Archives Center.

Heavy Turkish shelling across the border into Syria killed six U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters and wounded several civilians, a monitoring group said on Thursday.

The Israeli air force hit Syrian army positions on Thursday after fire from its war-wracked neighbor struck the Israeli-held zone of the Golan Heights, the Israeli military said.

It said the strike was in response to "a projectile" which landed on open ground on Wednesday, causing no injuries.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his U.S. counterpart John Kerry will meet on September 8-9 in Geneva to try to hammer out a deal on cooperation in Syria, Moscow said Wednesday.

Heavy fighting between regime troops and opposition forces has forced around 100,000 people from their homes in Syria's central Hama province, the United Nations said.

Morocco said Wednesday it has broken up a "terrorist cell" linked to the Islamic State group that authorities believe was planning attacks in the north of the country.

The world's chemical weapons watchdog said Wednesday it was "disturbed" by the alleged use of toxic chemicals in Aleppo after dozens of people had to be treated for breathing problems in the Syrian battlefront city.

Eight members of the rebel Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) have been killed in clashes with security forces along the Iraqi border, state media reported Wednesday.

The Syrian government has begun releasing 169 prisoners in exchange for the return of the bodies of five Russian soldiers killed when their helicopter was downed, a lawyer said Wednesday.