Israel has quietly helped fuel Azerbaijan's campaign to recapture Nagorno-Karabakh, supplying powerful weapons to Azerbaijan ahead of its lightening offensive last month that brought the ethnic Armenian enclave back under its control, officials and experts say.

Just weeks before Azerbaijan launched its 24-hour assault on Sept. 19, Azerbaijani military cargo planes repeatedly flew between a southern Israeli airbase and an airfield near Nagorno-Karabakh, according to flight tracking data and Armenian diplomats, even as Western governments were urging peace talks.

The role of sectarian divisions in fueling conflicts in Lebanon is one reason Talar Demirdjian distanced herself from religion.

"People either go very into their religion or their sects, or the other side." A Lebanese Armenian of Christian heritage, Demirdjian said about religion, "I don't even think about it enough to tick a label."

Israeli forces killed two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, the Palestinian health ministry said as the Israeli army reported soldiers were engaged in a shootout.

The health ministry said two men were killed by "occupation (Israeli) bullets near Tulkarem" in the northern West Bank. They were named as Abdul Rahman Atta, 23, and Huthaifa Faris, 27.

Turkish strikes Thursday on military and infrastructure targets in Kurdish-held northeastern Syria killed at least nine people, Kurdish security forces said, after Ankara had threatened raids in retaliation for a bomb attack.

While Turkey regularly carries out drone attacks in Syrian Kurds' semi-autonomous region, Ankara on Wednesday warned of more intense cross-border air raids, after concluding that militants who staged a weekend attack in the Turkish capital came from Syria.

Syrian army shelling killed an elderly woman and four of her children in the war-torn country's northwest, rescue workers and a monitor said on Thursday.

The overnight bombardment targeted their house in Kfar Nuran, close to the front line in the last rebel stronghold in the western province of Aleppo.

Turkey said on Wednesday that two suspected Kurdish militants who died while staging a weekend attack in Ankara had been trained in Syria.

In the ancient city of Jericho in the occupied West Bank, a prehistoric site has raised Palestinian hopes of a tourism boom after UNESCO declared it a World Heritage site.

Just a few dozen visitors braved the midday sun to stroll around Tell al-Sultan, where archaeologists have unearthed evidence of community life dating back about 10,000 years.

Iran said Wednesday it has agreed with Saudi Arabia to reschedule an Asian Champions League match after the Saudi team walked out at the last minute, apparently over the presence of a statue of a slain Iranian general.

The walkout appeared to further strain a recent rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, longtime rivals who have backed opposite sides in conflicts across the Middle East. But in the days since, both sides have appeared eager to move past it.

A video that shows ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting on the ground beside a procession of foreign Christian worshipers carrying a wooden cross in the holy city of Jerusalem has ignited intense outrage and a flurry of condemnation in the Holy Land.

The spitting incident, which the city's minority Christian community lamented as the latest in an alarming surge of religiously motivated attacks, drew rare outrage on Tuesday from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials.

Turkish warplanes have carried out new airstrikes against suspected Kurdish militant sites in northern Iraq, days after a suicide attack in the Turkish capital. Police, meanwhile, detained almost 1,000 people in raids across Turkey.

A defense ministry statement said the air raids hit 16 targets, including caves, shelters and depots, used by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK in the neighboring region. It said the operation aimed to protect Turkey's borders and prevent terror attacks.