United Nations war crimes investigators on Wednesday said they had evidence that Syrian government forces were behind the chemical attack that killed dozens of people in Khan Sheikhun in April.

In the first U.N. report to officially lay blame for the attack on Damascus, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Syria said it had gathered an "extensive body of information" showing Damascus was behind the horrific sarin gas attack in Khan Sheikhun on April 4 that killed at least 83 people.

The Islamic State group seized swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014 as it sought to establish its self-declared "caliphate", but has faced a series of major defeats in recent months.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir on Tuesday denied any warming of relations with regional rival Iran after Tehran thanked Riyadh for its handling of the annual hajj pilgrimage.

Human Rights Watch in a report released on Wednesday accused Egyptian security services of widespread torture of detainees in a probable "crime against humanity".

A Russian warship on Tuesday fired cruise missiles from the Mediterranean at the Islamic State group near the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor where regime forces are battling the jihadists, Moscow said.

Syria's army broke a years-long Islamic State group siege on the government enclave of Deir Ezzor city on Tuesday, entering into a military base, state media said.

More than 5,000 civilians have been killed in Yemen since March 2015, including 1,184 children, the UN human rights office said Tuesday, renewing its calls for an international probe into the conflict. 

Israeli police on Tuesday evicted a Palestinian family from the east Jerusalem home in which they lived for over half a century, making way for Israelis deemed the legal occupants.

The Shamasneh family has for years been fighting a court battle against Jewish claimants who said that the building was their family property, which they fled when east Jerusalem was occupied by Jordanian troops in the 1948 war that led to the creation of the Jewish state

Israel has suspended granting work visas for new foreign charity workers arriving in the country, humanitarians say, in a move that could impede aid to Palestinians.

Syria's army battled the Islamic State group on the edges of Deir Ezzor Monday, seeking to break the siege of a government enclave and oust the jihadists from a key stronghold.