Israel's defense minister on Wednesday began a trip to Bahrain, the first official visit by an Israeli defense chief since the two countries established diplomatic relations in 2020.

The two-day visit by Benny Gantz is scheduled to include meetings with top Bahrain defense officials and Bahraini leaders, the Israeli Defense Ministry said. There was no immediate confirmation of the visit from Bahrain, which like Israel, has great animosity toward Iran.

Turkish warplanes struck suspected Kurdish militant positions in Iraq and Syria early on Wednesday in a new aerial offensive which officials said aimed to protect Turkey's borders from terrorist threats.

A Turkish defense ministry statement said the strikes hit targets on Sinjar Mountain and in the Karacak region in northern Iraq, and the Derik region in northern Syria.

Israel's prime minister has acknowledged that its Iron Dome defense system is too expensive and the country is speeding the rollout of laser technology to help protect it from rocket attacks.

Naftali Bennett told a security conference that the new generation of technology -- a "laser wall" -- will be unveiled within a year in southern Israel. Little is known about the system's effectiveness, but the system eventually is expected to be deployed on land, in the air and at sea and send a deterrent message to archenemy Iran and its proxies.

A gas leak has killed a family of seven in their Cairo home, Egyptian authorities said.

According to a police statement, the tragedy took place on Monday in the Sharabia neighborhood of the Egyptian capital where the family — the parents and five siblings, aged 13 to 26 — died of suffocation.

Israeli police on Tuesday demolished the east Jerusalem home of a Palestinian militant who killed an Israeli man and wounded four others in a November shooting in Jerusalem's Old City.

Fadi Abu Shkhaidem shot Eliyahu Kay, a 26-year-old immigrant from South Africa, and wounded two police officers and two other bystanders in November's incident near Jerusalem's flashpoint holy site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. He was fatally shot by police at the scene.

The U.S. military launched interceptor missiles during an attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels that targeted the United Arab Emirates during a visit by Israel's president, the second-such time American troops have opened fire, officials said.

The acknowledgement by the White House and Pentagon late Monday represent a widening American involvement in Yemen's yearslong war, a conflict that President Joe Biden declared nearly a year ago "has to end."

Amnesty International said Tuesday that Israel has maintained "a system of oppression and domination" over the Palestinians going all the way back to its establishment in 1948, one that meets the international definition of apartheid.

With the release of a 278-page report compiled over a period of four years, the London-based rights group joins Human Rights Watch and the Israeli rights group B'Tselem in accusing Israel of apartheid — both within its borders and in the occupied territories.

President Joe Biden has designated Qatar a major non-NATO ally, a largely symbolic honor but one that was meant to convey his administration's gratitude for the tiny Persian Gulf nation's assistance with evacuations from Afghanistan and in ending last year's Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Biden announced the designation during a meeting with the ruling leader of Qatar at the White House. It comes as he looks for the gas-rich nation to step up again to help the West as it faces the prospect of a European energy crunch if Russia invades Ukraine.

The Israeli military said Tuesday it would reprimand a senior officer and remove two others from leadership roles over the death of a 78-year-old Palestinian who was dragged from a car, bound and blindfolded after being stopped at a checkpoint.

It said the soldiers believed Omar Asaad was asleep when they cut his zip-ties and left him face-down in an abandoned building where he had been detained with three other Palestinians. The other detainees said they did not know he was there until after the army left.

The United States on Monday urged its allies to repatriate suspected Islamic State-linked nationals detained in northeast Syria, after the jihadist group launched an attack on a prison to free its fighters.

Washington called on its partners in the international coalition to defeat the Islamic State (IS), also referred to as ISIS, "to improve the secure and humane detention of ISIS fighters, support rehabilitation initiatives, and urgently repatriate their nationals and other detainees remaining in northeast Syria," in a statement from State Department spokesman Ned Price.