At least 18 combatants have been killed in battles between Yemeni government forces and Iran-backed Huthi rebels in the country's southwest, two military officials told AFP on Thursday.

The clashes on Wednesday were triggered by a Huthi attack on a frontline area between government-controlled parts of Lahij governorate and Huthi-run parts of Taez province, said Mohammed al-Naqib, a spokesperson for the Southern Transitional Council, a separatist group allied with the government.

A Gaza hospital said at least 37 people were killed in an Israeli strike on a UN-run school on Thursday, that the Israeli military alleged housed a "Hamas compound".

The raid came after US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators resumed talks aimed at securing a truce and hostage-prisoner swap in the eight-month war triggered by Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel.

The Israeli military said it had "eliminated" several militants in a "precise strike on a Hamas compound embedded inside a UNRWA school" in the Nuseirat area of central Gaza.

When the Islamic State group rampaged through Iraq's ancient city of Mosul a decade ago, the jihadists killed thousands, upended countless more lives and left deep scars among the survivors.

Under their self-declared "caliphate" stretching across swathes of Syria and Iraq, they committed beheadings, torture and enslavement, turning life into living hell and leaving behind mass graves.

The Sunni Muslim extremists seized Mosul on June 10, 2014 and the group's then leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, soon made his first public appearance in the city's iconic Great Mosque of al-Nuri.

Holding a weapon in one hand and fixing her scarf with the other, Yasmine Youssef patrols one of northeast Syria's vast wheatfields, a vital source of income in the country's breadbasket.

The 42-year-old is among dozens of volunteers, some of them women, helping the semi-autonomous Kurdish-led region protect the fields near Qahtaniyah, from fires and arsonists.

"Our mission is to serve farmers and protect their crops," Youssef said, adding that the work lasts one or two months.

"If fires break out we are notified directly and we call the fire trucks," she told AFP.

The UN nuclear watchdog's board of governors has passed a resolution criticising Iran's lack of cooperation with the agency, diplomats told AFP on Wednesday, a decision Tehran slammed as "hasty and unwise".

The motion brought by Britain, France and Germany -- but opposed by China and Russia -- at the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board is the first of its kind since November 2022.

It comes amid an impasse over Iran's escalating nuclear activities and as Western powers fear Tehran may be seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, a claim Iran denies.

Israel's military pounded central Gaza with heavy air strikes on Wednesday as international talks to secure a truce and hostage release deal resumed.

Tensions were high in annexed east Jerusalem as thousands of police guarded Israel's annual "flag march" that has sparked clashes between Jews and Arabs in previous years.

The bloodiest ever Gaza war, sparked by Hamas's October 7 attack on southern Israel, raged on with jets bombing targets overnight and Palestinian officials reporting yet more deaths.

Waving flags and many chanting anti-Arab slogans, thousands of Israeli nationalists marched through annexed east Jerusalem's Old City on Wednesday, with main streets empty of Palestinians fearing attacks.

The so-called Jerusalem Day flag march commemorates the Israeli army's capture of the city's eastern sector in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, home to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site, which Jews call the Temple Mount.

A fresh offering of shares in Saudi Aramco, the Gulf kingdom's largely state-owned oil behemoth, comes at a pivotal moment for sweeping economic reforms that have struggled to lure foreign investment.

The sale of 1.545 billion shares, expected to begin trading next week, could fetch nearly $12 billion –- a short-term boon for officials working to finance everything from luxury resorts to football stadiums and a planned desert megacity known as NEOM.

A court in Turkey jailed Wednesday a pro-Kurdish mayor for 19 and a half years for "terrorism", his lawyer said, a ruling denounced as a "coup d'etat" by his party.

Mehmet Siddik Akis was removed from his post and placed in detention just two days earlier, provoking outrage and brawls in Turkey's parliament.

Denouncing a "political trial", Akis said: "I'm 53 years old, I've been fighting for all these years and I'll continue to fight."

Israeli police deployed in strength in annexed east Jerusalem Wednesday ahead of an annual march by Jewish nationalists that comes with tensions sky-high nearly eight months into the Gaza war.

The so-called Jerusalem Day flag march commemorates the Israeli army's capture in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war of the city's eastern sector home to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site, which Jews call the Temple Mount.