At least 97 migrants were missing after their boat sank on Thursday off the Libyan coast, a navy spokesman said.

A coalition air strike accidentally killed 18 members of a U.S.-backed Arab-Kurdish alliance fighting the Islamic State group near a key town in northern Syria, the U.S.-led coalition said Thursday.

Tuesday's strike occurred south of Tabqa, a strategically important town on the Euphrates River next to a dam and military airport, and close to the IS stronghold of Raqa.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi pledged to hunt down the perpetrators of last week's twin church bombings as he visited Coptic Pope Tawadros II on Thursday, his office said.

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has accused the West of fabricating a suspected chemical weapons attack that prompted an unprecedented U.S. missile strike, in an exclusive interview with AFP in Damascus.

The embattled leader, whose country has been ravaged by six years of war, said his firepower had not been affected by the attack ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump, but acknowledged that further strikes were possible.

France on Wednesday blasted Russia's vetoing of a U.N. draft resolution demanding the Syrian government cooperate with an investigation into a suspected chemical attack.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said he was "dismayed" by Russia's  veto on Wednesday of a U.N. draft resolution on the suspected chemical attack in Syria.

A Yemeni court in the rebel-held capital has sentenced a veteran journalist to death on charges of spying for neighboring Saudi Arabia, the press union and rebel media said Thursday.

Since March 2015, oil-rich Saudi Arabia has been leading a deadly military intervention against the rebels and their allies in the kingdom's impoverished neighbour.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says he will take "unprecedented steps" to end the political division between his West Bank-based autonomy government and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

The Islamic militant group Hamas seized Gaza from Abbas in 2007. The rivals failed to reconcile. A unity government set up by Abbas in 2014 never got off the ground in Gaza.

US President Donald Trump told allies it was time to end Syria's "brutal" civil war Wednesday, as he branded the country's leader Bashar Assad a "butcher" and questioned Russia's role in a suspected chemical attack.

Russia, Syria's top military ally, on Wednesday used its veto power for the eighth time at the UN Security Council to block action directed at its ally in Damascus since unrest erupted there in 2011.

The draft UN resolution had demanded that the regime of President Bashar Assad cooperate with an investigation into the deadly suspected chemical attack in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun on April 4.