Thousands of supporters of Iraq's powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr stepped up their pressure tactics Friday with a weekly prayer session in the high-security Green Zone they have occupied for three weeks.

The United Nations voiced outrage Friday at a Saudi court decision to sentence a woman to 34 years behind bars for tweets critical of the government, demanding she be released.

Iran said on Friday it is "using all its power" to secure the release of one of its nationals arrested in Saudi Arabia during the hajj pilgrimage last month.

Khalil Dardmand was arrested by police in the holy city of Mecca after completing his hajj rituals, Iran's foreign ministry said in a statement, without providing other details about the case.

Israel said Friday it plans to grant more work permits to Palestinians in blockaded Gaza, reviving a pledge made ahead of a visit by U.S. President Joe Biden but later scrapped.

A further 1,500 people from the impoverished and overcrowded Gaza Strip would be allowed to work in Israel from Sunday, the military said in a statement.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday that Turkey was not looking to seize any Syrian territory despite stepping up its attacks against Kurdish forces in the war-torn country's north.

Erdogan's comments came days after a Turkish air strikes on a Syrian border post run by regime forces reportedly killed 17 fighters.

A rocket attack on a crowded market in a town held by Turkey-backed opposition fighters in northern Syria Friday killed at least nine people and wounded dozens, an opposition war monitor and a paramedic group reported.

The attack on the town of al-Bab came days after a Turkish airstrike killed at least 11 Syrian troops and U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, blamed Syrian government forces for the shelling, saying it was in retaliation for the Turkish airstrike.

A Palestinian man was killed Friday by Israeli forces during a raid in the north of the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said.

Salah Sawafta, 58, "died of critical wounds, sustained by live bullets from the occupation (Israeli military) in the head, in Tubas this morning," a ministry statement said.

Berlin police said Friday they have launched an investigation into Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas over his comments on the Holocaust during a recent visit to the German capital.

Police have received a complaint accusing Abbas of "relativizing the Holocaust" and are investigating "on suspicion of inciting hatred", a police spokeswoman told AFP.

Only ever found in incomplete, clandestine translations in Arabic, "The Satanic Verses" could have gone largely unnoticed in the Arab world, were it not for the Iranian religious edict against its author Salman Rushdie.

Then supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa calling for Rushdie's death, issued on February 14, 1989, struck a nerve with Arab authors, themselves often in danger of ruffling authoritarian feathers and "offending moral values".

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Israel's prime minister Thursday that he condemns any attempts to deny or downplay the Holocaust, offering reassurance after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sparked outrage with remarks to that effect earlier this week.

Speaking at a joint news conference with Scholz in Berlin, Abbas on Tuesday accused Israel of committing "50 Holocausts" against Palestinians over the years. Scholz, who was standing next to Abbas, didn't immediately react to the comments but later strongly criticized them.