Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has appointed a new media advisor who has tweeted critically against President Joe Biden, the daily Haaretz reported.

The appointment comes at a time when U.S.-Israel relations are strained.

Saudi Arabia has welcomed Venzuelan President Nicolas Maduro on an official visit, reaching out to yet another U.S. foe as the oil-rich kingdom engages in a flurry of diplomacy.

Maduro arrived late Sunday in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, where he was greeted by Saudi officials, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency.

Fifty Islamic State-group jihadists and 168 Iraqi members of jihadist families were repatriated from Syria to Iraq on Saturday, an Iraqi official said.

A gunbattle along Israel's southern border with Egypt left three Israeli soldiers and an Egyptian officer dead, officials said. It was a rare instance of deadly violence along the frontier.

Israel said the Egyptian border guard crossed into Israel and killed the three soldiers before he was fatally shot by troops. Egypt said he had been chasing drug smugglers when he entered Israel.

When the Syrian Kurdish sisters Perwin and Norshean Salih sing about loss, it comes from the heart.

Aged in their early 20s, they have twice been driven from their family home in the northern Syrian town of Kobane -- once by the Islamic State group, and again by the threat of Turkish bombs.

At the height of the Islamic State group's rampage across Syria, the world watched in horror as the militants blew up an iconic arch and temple in the country's famed Roman ruins in Palmyra.

Eight years later, IS has lost its hold but restoration work on the site has been held up by security issues, leftover IS land mines and lack of funding.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has met with China's deputy foreign minister and other top diplomats from the BRICS bloc of developing economies for discussions that included the group's possible expansion to include the major oil-producing nations of Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

Ahead of the talks at a luxury oceanside hotel in South Africa, Lavrov cast BRICS — an acronym for current members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — as central to the establishment of a "more just" world order.

A 3-year-old Palestinian boy was in critical condition at an Israeli hospital Friday morning after being shot by Israeli fire in the occupied West Bank. The army opened an investigation into what it said was an unintentional shooting.

In a statement, the military said that gunmen opened fire late Thursday toward the West Bank settlement of Neve Tzuf. It said soldiers at a guard post returned fire.

An Israeli woman critically wounded in a 2001 suicide bombing at a Jerusalem restaurant has died, an Israeli hospital said Thursday. Her death marks the sixteenth fatality from that attack.

Hana Nachenberg was 31 at the time and was dining with her 3-year-old daughter when the blast occurred, Israeli media reported. She was in a coma for nearly 22 years until she died on Wednesday, reports said. Her daughter was not hurt in the attack.

Thousands of people are to march in Jerusalem's Pride parade on Thursday, an annual event that is taking place this year under Israel's most right-wing government ever, stacked with openly homophobic members.

The march in the conservative city is always tense and tightly secured by police, and has been wracked by violence in the past. But this year, Israel finds itself deeply riven over a contentious government plan to overhaul the judiciary. The plan has torn open longstanding societal divisions between those who want to preserve Israel's liberal values and those who seek to shift it toward more religious conservatism.