The European Union on Saturday "unequivocally" condemned attacks by the Palestinian group Hamas on Israel and called for an immediate stop to the violence.

"We follow with anguish the news coming from Israel. We unequivocally condemn the attacks by Hamas. This horrific violence must stop immediately. Terrorism and violence solve nothing. The EU expresses its solidarity with Israel in these difficult moments," EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said.

Israel's army carried out at least two air strikes on the Gaza Strip Saturday, an AFP journalist reported, after barrages of rockets were fired from the Palestinian territory into Israel.

More than 5,000 rockets had been fired so far from the Gaza Strip, the armed wing of Hamas which controls the blockaded coastal enclave said. Medics said the rocket fire killed at least one Israeli, a woman in her 60s.

Israeli police have arrested an American tourist at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem after he hurled works of art to the floor, defacing two second-century Roman statues.

The vandalism late Thursday raised questions about the safety of Israel's priceless collections and stirred concern about a rise in attacks on cultural heritage in Jerusalem.

A nonprofit rescue ship operating off the coast of Libya saved 258 migrants in two separate operations in the early hours of Friday morning.

The first of the two rescues involved a a 7-meter (23-foot) -long wooden boat filled with 162 migrants, including 17 women and 29 minors, many of them in a cramped area below the deck.

If Saudi Arabia could have designed a process for choosing future World Cup hosts, it might look similar to what FIFA unveiled this week for the 2030 and 2034 men's soccer tournaments.

The Saudi Arabian soccer federation became the favored — and possibly only — candidate to host the biggest event in the world's favorite sport in 2034.

Israeli troops have killed three Palestinian gunmen in West Bank violence on Thursday, Palestinian health officials said, in the latest deaths in a monthslong surge of violence in the occupied territory.

In video circulated on social media, a lone gunman opened fire at an Israeli car in broad daylight on a busy street in Hawara, a flashpoint town in the northern West Bank. The gunman fired at least 10 shots, pursuing the car as it tried to escape by driving over a barrier in the middle of the street.

Turkish warplanes have carried out airstrikes on sites believed to be used by U.S.-backed Kurdish militant groups in northern Syria after the U.S. military shot down an armed Turkish drone that came within 500 meters (yards) of American troops.

A Turkish defense ministry statement said the Turkish jets targeted some 30 sites in the Tal Rifat, Jazeera and Derik regions, destroying caves, bunkers, shelters and warehouses used by Kurdistan Workers' Party, PKK, or its affiliated Kurdish militia group in Syria, which is known as People's Defense Units, or YPG.

An attack Thursday on a Syrian military academy killed 112 people, a war monitor said, with state media blaming "terrorist organisations" for the drone strike in government-held Homs.

Separately, Turkish air raids in the country's Kurdish-held northeast killed at least 11 people, according to Kurdish forces, after Ankara had threatened retaliation for a bomb attack.

At least seven Syrian security personnel were killed and more than 20 wounded Thursday when a drone attack targeted a military academy in Homs province, a war monitor said.

"Seven dead and more than 20 regime officers wounded in a violent explosion in the area of the military academy in Homs, caused by an attack by drones during a graduation ceremony," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Israel is a nation perennially swept up in religious fervor and conflict. And yet, strikingly, a large portion of its population is secular, and even its insular ultra-Orthodox community loses a steady stream of members who tire of its strict religious rules.

The country is home to about 7 million Jews, almost half of the global Jewish population. But Jewish identity is a complex blend of religious and ethnonational identity; most Israeli Jews are not diligent observers of Judaism.