Gaza’s city workers cleared roads of rubble and fixed power lines on Wednesday as a ceasefire took hold after 50 days of war, with displaced families expressing a sense of relief and frustration as they returned to their damaged homes.

A bereaved Syrian mother whose son has been killed by fighters of the Islamic State (IS) has written a letter to Diane Foley, the mother of the slain US reporter James Foley who was allegedly killed by the same group a few days ago.

President Barack Obama has authorised surveillance flights over Syria in order to gather intelligence on the Islamic State group, a senior US administration official said.

At least five Israeli air strikes have destroyed much of one of Gaza’s tallest apartment and office buildings, setting off huge explosions and wounding 20 people, Palestinian health officials said.

ISIL militants stormed an air base in northeast Syria on Sunday, capturing it from government forces after days of fighting that cost more than 500 lives, a monitoring group said.

At least five Palestinians, including two children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike targeting a house in the central Gaza Strip on Saturday, according to a Health Ministry spokesman.

A suicide bomber rammed a vehicle into an intelligence headquarters in Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least seventeen people, police and medical sources said.

The death toll from a shooting attack by Shi’ite militia forces on a Sunni mosque in Iraq on Friday has reached 68, a morgue official said, according to Reuters.

More than 191,000 people were killed in the first three years of Syria’s civil war, a U.N. report said on Friday, and the world body’s human rights envoy rebuked leading powers for failing to halt what she branded a “wholly avoidable human catastrophe”.

An Israeli air strike on a house in Gaza has killed three senior Hamas military commanders, militants say.