Egyptian prosecutors are denying allegations of torture and ill-treatment leveled by a prominent imprisoned activist and claim he is in good condition, years after the allegations were made.

For nearly 10 days, Alaa Abdel-Fattah's family members say they have not heard from him and have been told by prison officials he's refusing to meet with them. Amnesty International has urged Egyptian authorities to allow the family access to the 40-year-old programmer and father serving a five-year sentence.

French leader Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman agreed to work "to ease the effects" of the Ukraine war, Macron's office said Friday, after talks in Paris that marked the full diplomatic rehabilitation of the Saudi leader.

Like U.S. President Joe Biden who visited Riyadh earlier this month, Macron had been keen to secure extra oil production from the de facto Saudi leader who was a pariah in the West under recently.

The followers of the influential populist Shiite cleric came by the thousands to storm Iraq's parliament. Just as quickly, the protesters dispersed at his command.

Mass mobilization and control is a well-worn strategy of Muqtada al-Sadr, a mercurial figure who has emerged as a powerful force in Iraq's cutthroat political scene with a nationalist, anti-Iran agenda.

Iran arrested five people accused of links to the Israeli spy agency Mossad, state media said on Thursday, in the second such report in as many days. 

"A spy network consisting of five members affiliated with the Zionist regime was identified and arrested," said a police intelligence statement quoted by the official news agency IRNA.

Morocco is jailing journalists after flawed trials for non-political crimes, particularly sexual ones, in order to silence them, part of a range of "techniques of repression", Human Rights Watch said Thursday.

"Moroccan authorities have developed and refined a full manual of techniques to muzzle the opposition, even as it claims to be simply applying the law against them in a neutral manner," it said.

The Israeli army has said that Hamas has rebuilt some of the capabilities that were damaged during last year's Gaza war, including three new tunnels and a series of weapons manufacturing and storage sites.

The army published aerial imagery and maps showing what it said are tunnels, weapons factories and arms depots. It said the installations were near al-Azhar University in Gaza City, a Pepsi factory, mosques, United Nations facilities and hospitals elsewhere in Gaza.

A relative of slain Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh has said that the Biden administration's top diplomat refused her face-to-face appeal to push for a full U.S. investigation into the killing of the veteran television correspondent.

Niece Lina Abu Akleh also said Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. officials declined in meetings with her this week to provide any more information than they had already made public about how Americans reached the findings about the killing that they released this month.

Gaza's Hamas rulers have imposed a slew of new taxes on imported clothes and office supplies just ahead of the new school year, sparking limited but rare protests in the impoverished coastal strip.

The move by the militant group comes at a time when Gaza's 2.3 million people are suffering not only from a 15-year Israeli-Egyptian blockade, but also from a new jump in prices caused by global supply-chain issues and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

French President Emmanuel Macron is hosting Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for talks in Paris on Thursday, defying criticism that the invitation is deeply inappropriate barely four years after the murder by Saudi agents of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The meeting will be seen as the latest step in the readmission of the de-facto ruler of the kingdom into the international fold, after U.S. President Joe Biden met the man universally known as MBS earlier this month.

Supporters of powerful Iraqi cleric Moqtada Sadr on Wednesday penetrated the capital's high-security Green Zone, home to government buildings and diplomatic missions, an AFP reporter said.