U.N. aid flights into Yemen's rebel-held capital Sanaa have been halted by air strikes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition which supports the government, an airport official said Tuesday.

Because of coalition air strikes targeting the Huthi rebels, "the airport is no longer able to receive aircraft operated by the United Nations or international humanitarian organizations", the official told AFP.

More than 160 migrants drowned in two separate shipwrecks off Libya over past week, a United Nations migration official said Tuesday. The fatalities were the latest disasters in the Mediterranean Sea involving migrants seeking a better life in Europe.

Safa Msehli, a spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration, said at least 102 migrants were reported dead after their wooden boat capsized off Libya on Friday. At least eight others were rescued and returned to shore, she said.

She had already walked for 60 hours through the wet, dark forests of Poland, trying to make her way to Germany, when the 29-year-old Syrian Kurd twisted her knee.

It wasn't the first setback in Bushra's journey.

Israel's former military intelligence chief says Israel was involved in the American airstrike that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. It is the first public acknowledgement of Israel's role in the operation.

Soleimani headed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's elite Quds Force and helped orchestrate Iran's involvement with paramilitary groups abroad. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike at the Baghdad airport in January 2020, an incident that threatened to pull the countries into full-blown conflict.

Iran's top diplomat to Yemen died on Tuesday after reportedly contracting the coronavirus, Iranian state TV said, just days after he was abruptly recalled from his mission in the war-torn nation.

State-run media in Iran said Ambassador Hassan Irloo had become infected with the coronavirus in Yemen, where a conflict between Iran-backed Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led military coalition has raged for six years. Authorities said he was flown out of the country for urgent medical treatment in Iran over the weekend.

A group of candidates in war-torn Libya's presidential election said Monday that they expect the polls to be delayed, despite the lack of an official announcement to that effect.

Scheduled for Friday, the vote is meant to cap a United Nations-led peace process after a decade of conflict.

Egypt on Monday sentenced one of the country's most prominent activists to five years in prison on charges of spreading false news, a defense lawyer said. The activist's former attorney and another activist were sentenced in the same case, each to four years.

Alaa Abdel-Fattah was first sentenced in 2014 on charges of taking part in an unauthorized protest and allegedly assaulting a police officer. He was released in 2019 after serving a five-year term but was rearrested again later that year, in a crackdown that followed anti-government protests.

Stormy weather has prompted Egyptian authorities to suspend classes Monday in the capital of Cairo and a handful of other provinces as a precautionary measure.

Authorities also closed the ports in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and the Suez Canal cities of Port Said and Suez.

Each month, hundreds of trucks heavy with fuel, cement and other goods cross a plowed no man's land between Egypt and the Gaza Strip — and Hamas becomes stronger.

Hamas collects tens of millions of dollars a month in taxes and customs at the crossing in the border town of Rafah, according to estimates. The funds help it operate a government and powerful armed wing while international aid covers most of the basic needs of Gaza's 2 million residents.

Iran's ambassador flew out of the rebel-held Yemeni capital to receive Covid treatment in a rare exemption from an air blockade enforced by a Saudi-led coalition, Saudi and Iranian officials said.