Saudi Arabia views Cyprus as a "bridge" between the Middle East and the European Union, helping the 27-nation bloc "understand what's going on" in the region, the Saudi foreign minister has said.

Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, speaking after talks with his Cypriot counterpart Ioannis Kasoulides, said that Cyprus helps "really focus the attention" on all the opportunities and challenges in the Middle East.

Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian during clashes in the occupied West Bank late Sunday, hours after police fanned out in a tense east Jerusalem neighborhood trying to contain violence between ultranationalist Jewish activists and Palestinian residents.

Early Monday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Akram Abu Salah, 17, died from a gunshot to his head.

After years of behind-the-scenes activity in the Gaza Strip, Egypt is going public.

Since mediating a cease-fire between Israel and Gaza's ruling Hamas militant group, Egypt has sent crews to clear rubble and is promising to build vast new apartment complexes. Egyptian flags and billboards praising President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi have sprung up across the Palestinian territory.

Israeli police clashed with Palestinians in the flashpoint east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah on Sunday, as a visit by a controversial far-right Jewish lawmaker inflamed tensions.

Hundreds took to the streets of a southern Syrian city on Friday to demand democracy and better living conditions in a rare protest inside regime-held areas, a war monitor said.

The head of an Arab party in Israel who made history last year by joining the governing coalition said he would not use the word "apartheid" to describe relations between Jews and Arabs within the country.

Amnesty International last week joined two other well-known human rights groups in saying that Israel's policies toward the Palestinians within its borders and in the occupied territories amounts to apartheid. Israel rejects those allegations as antisemitic, saying that, among other things, they ignore the rights and freedoms enjoyed by its Arab citizens.

The Islamic State is a growing threat to northeast Syria, and the group will again flourish unless immediate action is taken, the Kurdish-led region's security chief said in the wake of last month's deadly prison attack.

Mazloum Abdi, the commander of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, said immediate security measures were taken to contain active IS sleeper cells, but the group is proving to be a resilient insurgency. The threat remains high, he said, despite the death of the group's leader in a U.S. commando operation last week.

Turkish spies thwarted a plot orchestrated by Iran to kill an Israeli-Turkish businessman based in Istanbul, a pro-government daily reported Friday.

Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) discovered a network of nine operatives dubbed an "Iran assassination team" plotting to kill Yair Geller, the Sabah daily reported.

Libyans found themselves with two prime ministers on Friday, raising the specter of renewed violence in a country where elites have ignored the wishes of citizens to choose their leaders, analysts say.

After weeks of maneuvering since December 24 elections were indefinitely postponed, the House of Representatives in the country's east on Thursday picked former interior minister and ex-fighter pilot Fathi Bashagha to replace interim prime minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah.

U.S. military officials say there could have been more civilian casualties than initially thought in the raid that killed the top Islamic State leader in Syria last week, but they believe any such deaths were caused by the militant's suicide bomb and were not at the hands of American forces.

Laying out a chronology of the raid by special operations forces, officials also said they cannot be certain that Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi detonated the bomb that killed him and his family at his home in the sleepy village of Atmeh near the Turkish border.