Senior Israeli diplomats are eagerly working to open new communication channels with Egypt’s Islamists, so far seen as the major winner of the country’s first free elections since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak last February.

Syria has agreed to allow an Arab observer mission into the country, ending weeks of prevarication that had prompted the Arab League to adopt sanctions over the government’s crackdown on protests.

Some 550 Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli jails late Sunday, December 18, in the second phase of an Egyptian-sponsored swap prisoner deal between Israel and Hamas, The New York Times reported.

More than 70 Syrian army commanders and officials have been named by former soldiers as having ordered attacks on unarmed protesters in that country, a US-based rights group says.

A large number of Jewish settlers at dawn Wednesday set fire to a mosque in the occupied Jerusalem as part of the “price tag” campaign by the extremist settlers against Palestinians.

In a historical moment, President Mahmoud Abbas has raised the Palestinian flag for the first time at the headquarters of the UN cultural agency, a move seen as the first step of international recognition of an independent Palestine.

More than 5,000 people have been killed in nine months of unrest in Syria, the U.N. human rights chief said, as an insurgency begins to overshadow what had been mostly peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad.

New rules requiring Muslim women to remove their full face veil or niqab while they take the oath of Canadian citizenship were widely criticized as forcing them to choose between their religious convictions and adopting Canadian citizenship.

A man has opened fire with an assault rifle and thrown grenades in the Belgian city of Liege, staging an attack in which five people died including the gunman himself, officials said.

Hundreds of army defectors in southern Syria have fought with loyalist forces in one of the biggest armed confrontations in the nine-month uprising, and a strike shut businesses in a new gesture of civil disobedience, residents and activists said.