Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has issued an order mandating that his office approve all secret diplomatic meetings in advance, his spokesperson said, as officials scrambled to contain the growing diplomatic firestorm over Israel's disclosure that its top diplomat had met with his Libyan counterpart.

The exposure of the first-ever known encounter between Israeli and Libyan foreign ministers ignited angry street protests in several Libyan cities and sent Libyan Foreign Minister Najla Mangoush fleeing to Turkey for fear of her safety. Libyan Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who heads one of the country's rival governments, said he was temporarily suspending Mangoush from her position over the reported meeting. Libya has a history of unremitting hostility toward Israel.

Twenty-two people including three civilians have died in clashes in Kurdish-held northeastern Syria between U.S.-backed fighters and members of an affiliated group whose leader was arrested, a war monitor said Tuesday.

"Sixteen local fighters and three members of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have been killed" during the clashes in several villages in the east of Deir Ezzor province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, raising an earlier toll.

A plane carrying Israelis home from the Indian Ocean island nation of Seychelles made an emergency stop in Saudi Arabia before flying back to Tel Aviv on Tuesday, in what Israel praised as a sign of goodwill as Washington works to establish formal relations between the two countries.

Israeli media reported the Air Seychelles flight carrying 128 passengers was forced to land Monday because of an electrical malfunction. Israel's Foreign Ministry said the passengers spent the night at an airport hotel in Jeddah and were flown back by the airline on an alternate plane.

Bahraini authorities have agreed to offer prisoners extra rights, including more visiting hours, following a hundreds-strong hunger strike that activists say is the largest in the country's history.

The interior ministry late Monday said it would "increase the duration of visitations" and was looking to increase the time inmates are allowed outdoors -- a step that has so far failed to quell the hunger strike at Jau prison that started in early August.

A French soldier serving alongside Iraqi forces was killed in combat during a counterterrorism operation north of Baghdad, according to the French military.

Such losses among foreign forces in Iraq have been rare in recent years. Two Iraqi soldiers and four other French troops were also wounded in the operation, which an Iraqi official said was targeting a cell of the Islamic State group.

A new coalition of Egyptian political parties has publicly criticized the country's current government for persecuting politicians, in a rare act of political dissent.

In a news conference Monday, Emad Gad, a spokesmen for the Free Current coalition, said the practices of President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi's government "represent a severe danger to the political and economic future of our country."

The United Nations' top official in Yemen has warned that the Arab world's poorest country will remain a powder keg for renewed war unless its rival factions work out a new cease-fire deal.

Hans Grundberg, the U.N. special representative for Yemen, told The Associated Press the situation in the conflict-stricken country is fragile nearly a year after the internationally recognized government and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels failed to renew a U.N.-brokered cease-fire.

Sudan's top military officer is traveling to Egypt on Tuesday on his first trip abroad since the country plunged into a bitter conflict this year, authorities said.

Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, chairman of the ruling Sovereign Council, was expected to hold talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi on the latest developments in Sudan, the council said in a statement.

Anti-government protests in southern Syria have stretched into a second week, with demonstrators waving the colorful flag of the minority Druze community, burning banners of President Bashar Assad's government and at one point raiding several offices of his ruling party.

The protests were initially driven by surging inflation and the war-torn country's spiraling economy but quickly shifted focus, with marchers calling for the fall of the Assad government.

Iran and Iraq have reached an agreement to disarm members of Iranian Kurdish dissident groups based in northern Iraq and relocate their members from their current bases, officials from the two countries said Monday.

Nasser Kanaani, the spokesman for Iran's Foreign Ministry, said in a news briefing Monday that the Iraqi government had agreed "to disarm the armed terrorist groups stationed in Iraq's territory by September 19, and then, evacuate and transfer them from their military bases to camps designated by the Iraqi government."