An influential Shiite cleric in Iraq whose supporters earlier this month stormed the parliament in Baghdad and have since held a sit-in outside the building, has stepped up his demands and issued a veiled threat of renewed violence.

The cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, said on Twitter that the judiciary has one week to dissolve the legislature. Al-Sadr has previously demanded that the parliament be dissolved and that early elections are held but this time, he set a deadline.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi on Wednesday inaugurated the reconstruction of Mosul international airport, still in disrepair five years after the battle that expelled the Islamic State group from the city.

Entire sectors of the northern metropolis have remained in ruins since the July 2017 recapture of Mosul by Iraqi forces backed by a U.S.-led multinational coalition.

Egypt detained a male student Wednesday on suspicion of murdering a female student who allegedly rejected his advances, after the second such campus femicide in two months, prosecutors said.

A former Twitter employee has been convicted of failing to register as an agent for Saudi Arabia and other charges after accessing private data on users critical of the kingdom's government in a spy case that spanned from Silicon Valley to the Middle East.

Ahmad Abouammo, a U.S. citizen and former media partnership manager for Twitter's Middle East region, was charged in 2019 with acting as an agent of Saudi Arabia without registering with the U.S. government. A jury found him guilty on six counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. The jury acquitted him on another five charges involving wire fraud.

Palestinians from the occupied West Bank will soon be allowed to travel on flights to Turkey out of an Israeli airport, the Israel Airports Authority said.

The move is part of a series of gestures Israel says it is making to improve the living conditions of Palestinians in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Critics say the measures do not address the daily humiliations of the decades-long occupation or pave the road for Palestinian statehood.

A Palestinian hunger striker who his family says has refused food for the past 160 days and is wasting away in an Israeli jailhouse infirmary has suddenly been thrust into the center of efforts to firm up a Gaza cease-fire.

Khalil Awawdeh is in the spotlight because the Islamic Jihad group sought his release as part of Egyptian-brokered talks that ended three days of fighting between the Gaza-based militants and Israel over the weekend.

A Turkish drone strike Tuesday killed at least four people in a northeast Syrian city held by Kurdish forces, the latest in a flurry of attacks, a war monitor said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attack struck near a hospital in Qamishli, the de facto capital of a semi-autonomous Kurdish administration that runs large parts of the country's northeast.

Kurdish Iraqi farmer Azad Muhamad has become a social media star by sharing tips on growing fresh fruit and vegetables in the sun-parched country that is highly vulnerable to climate change.  

Hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslims on Tuesday marked the festival of Ashura in Iraq's holy city of Karbala, the burial place of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed.

The top U.N. Mideast envoy warned Monday that the ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants is "fragile" and the "cycles of violence" will only stop when an independent Palestinian state lives side-by-side with Israel.

Tor Wennesland called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders and the international community at an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on the latest violence "to strengthen diplomatic efforts to return to meaningful negotiations towards a viable two-state solution."