Israel's government on Monday was pressing ahead with a contentious plan to overhaul Israel's legal system, despite an unprecedented uproar that has included mass protests, warnings from military and business leaders and calls for restraint by the United States.

Thousands of demonstrators were expected to gather outside the parliament, or Knesset, for a second straight week to rally against the plan as lawmakers prepared to hold an initial vote.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and separately with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, reaffirming U.S. support for a "two-state solution" in the region and asking the two to "restore calm."

Helicopter-borne U.S. troops working with Syrian Kurdish-led forces have captured an Islamic State provincial official in Syria, the U.S. military said.

An Israeli air strike in Syria killed 15 people early Sunday and badly damaged a building in a Damascus district that is home to several state security agencies, a war monitoring group said. 

Civilians, including two women, were among those killed in "the deadliest Israeli attack in the Syrian capital" so far, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The death toll from an attack blamed on the Islamic State group in Syria has risen to 68, a war monitor said Saturday, the deadliest attack in over a year.

Mass protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government focusing on deeply controversial reforms of the judicial system have united diverse groups fearing it would give the legislative branch nearly unchecked authority.

Netanyahu and his allies in government, the most right-wing in Israel's history, say the reforms are necessary to correct an imbalance that has given judges too much power over elected officials.

More than 140 trucks carrying desperately-needed aid have crossed into rebel-held northwestern Syria from Turkey since a giant earthquake devastated the region last week, the United Nations said Friday.

"Since February 9 up to last night, we had a total of 143 trucks going through the Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salama border crossings," Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, told reporters in Geneva. 

Syrian refugees living in Turkey sought to get back to their war-torn country on Friday after swathes of their adopted home were destroyed by last week's earthquake.

Hundreds queued at the Cilvegozu border crossing in southeast Turkey following the quake, which has killed more than 41,000 people and displaced millions across both countries.

Five Syrian children and their parents died on Friday in a fire that struck a Turkish home they moved to after surviving last week's earthquake, local media reported.

The family had relocated to the central region of Konya from the southeastern Turkish city of Nurdagi, which was badly hit by the February 6 quake, to stay with relatives.

A Palestinian-backed U.N. resolution that could be put to a vote in the Security Council early next week would demand an immediate halt to all Israeli settlement activities, condemn Israeli attempts to annex settlements and outposts, "and call for their immediate reversal."

In Washington, the State Department said it believed the resolution as drafted was "unhelpful," but declined to say if it would veto the document or try to water it down to avoid a contentious vote.