In two volatile spots in the occupied West Bank, Israel has installed robotic weapons that can fire tear gas, stun grenades and sponge-tipped bullets at Palestinian protesters.

The weapons, perched over a crowded Palestinian refugee camp and in a flashpoint West Bank city, use artificial intelligence to track targets. Israel says the technology saves lives — both Israeli and Palestinian. But critics see another step toward a dystopian reality in which Israel fine-tunes its open-ended occupation of the Palestinians while keeping its soldiers out of harm's way.

Outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid said Tuesday Israeli soldiers "will not be interrogated" by the FBI over the killing in May of Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

Syria's Kurdish authorities have recovered the bodies of two Egyptian girls dumped in sewage at the notorious Al-Hol detention camp, local security personnel said on Tuesday.

"The bodies of two Egyptian girls were found in the sewage waters" at Al-Hol a day earlier, a Kurdish security source told AFP, requesting anonymity.

Saudi Arabia's powerful crown prince has embarked on a multi-stop Asian tour, shoring up the Gulf nation's ties with its biggest energy market and signaling growing independence from Washington amid a bitter row over oil supply.

Two Israelis were killed Tuesday in an attack in the occupied West Bank, with the Palestinian perpetrator shot dead, Israeli and Palestinian officials said.

The latest surge in violence comes hours before Israel swears in its new parliament, with far-right lawmakers poised to be members of the cabinet vowing a crackdown on Palestinian violence.

Missiles fired from Iran have targeted bases of an exiled Iranian Kurdish opposition group in neighboring Iraq, killing at least one person and wounding eight, local officials said. It was the latest in a series of such attacks in recent weeks.

One official with the Iranian opposition in Iraq later put the death toll at three while the health minister in Iraq's semi-autonomous, Kurdish-run region said the casualty number was expected to rise.

For decades, Doha has flung open its doors to Taliban warlords, Islamist dissidents, African rebel commanders and exiles of every stripe.

Now, the tiny emirate is receiving extra scrutiny as it welcomes over a million soccer fans from around the world for the 2022 World Cup.

French oil giant Total said Tuesday it would soon launch exploration activities in search for gas in the Mediterranean Sea off Lebanon's coast, following last month's Lebanon-Israel deal on their maritime border.

According to a statement, TotalEnergies and its partner, Italy's ENI, signed with Israel a so-called "Framework Agreement" to implement the U.S.-mediated border agreement reached last month. Lebanon and Israel have been formally at war since Israel's creation in 1948.

Israel's outgoing coalition has been the most diverse in the country's history, bringing a slew of progressive policies on the environment, LGBTQ issues and funding for the country's Arab minority.

But now, even before it takes office, Israel's expected new coalition government — overwhelmingly male, religious and right-wing — is promising to roll back many of the achievements of its predecessor, prompting concern from activists and liberals over where their country is headed.

The U.S. navy said Tuesday it had scuttled a boat transporting "explosive materials" from Iran to supply Huthi rebels in Yemen, with enough power to fuel a dozen ballistic rockets.

The boat, which the U.S. navy seized on November 8 in the Gulf of Oman was sunk on Sunday, the Bahrain-based United States Fifth Fleet said.