A Taliban official said on Wednesday the United States had promised to withdraw half of its troops from Afghanistan by the end of April, but the US military said no timeframe had been set.

A Palestinian was shot dead and another wounded on Monday near an Israeli checkpoint in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian officials said.

The US peace envoy for Afghanistan has hailed “significant progress” in six days of talks with the Taliban in the Qatari capital, Doha, aimed at finding a solution to end the 17-year-old war in the South Asian country.

A Palestinian man has been shot dead, and dozens others have been wounded in the occupied West Bank during a confrontation with Israeli soldiers and settlers in the village of al-Mugheir, northeast of Ramallah.

The Taliban killed more than 100 members of the Afghan security forces inside a military compound in central Maidan Wardak province on Monday, a senior defense official said.

The United States and the Taliban on Monday resumed their talks in Doha aimed at ending the stalemate over participation of Afghan government in negotiations for a political settlement of the conflict.

A restaurant in northern Syria’s Manbij town center was rocked by an explosion Wednesday, killing at least 16 people and injuring many others, a Syrian war monitoring group said.

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired a rocket at Israel late Saturday, Israel’s army said, prompting retaliatory strikes on the territory’s rulers Hamas as tensions rose after another day of violent border clashes.

A Turkish charity agency handed out some 51,000 copies of Quran, Muslim holy book, in 10 countries and regions in 2018, the aid group said on Thursday.

At least 168 people have been killed and over 700 injured after a volcano-triggered tsunami hit both sides of Indonesia’s Sunda Strait on Saturday, sending a wall of water crashing some 20 metres inland and sweeping away hundreds of homes and hotels, officials and witnesses have said.