Saudi Arabia’s Hima, a mountainous area that is home to a large collection of rock art images dating back thousands of years, has been added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, the agency announced on Saturday.

A drone attack has been carried out on a military base in Iraqi Kurdistan that hosts American troops, without causing any casualties, the US-led coalition said yesterday.

Amid the raging controversy over its surveillance software Pegasus, Israeli cybersecurity company NSO Group has defended itself by saying that millions of people around the world sleep well at night and walk in the streets safely due to such technologies available with intelligence and law enforcement agencies. 

The Taliban’s claim to hold 90 percent of Afghanistan’s borders is an “absolute lie”, the defence ministry said yesterday, insisting government forces were in control of the country’s frontiers.

Former UN rights chief Navi Pillay will lead the United Nations’ open-ended inquiry into “systematic” abuses in Israel and the Palestinian territories, it was announced on Thursday.

Inspired by her late father's career, Mona decided to join the military and the first group of Saudi women soldiers to work in Islam's holiest sites, where they are helping secure the haj annual pilgrimage.

American ice-cream brand Ben & Jerry's on Monday said it would stop marketing its products in the occupied Palestinian territories, bowing to Palestinian pressure campaigns and saying that selling there was "inconsistent" with company values.

A suicide bomber killed at least 35 people and wounded dozens in a crowded market in the Sadr City neighbourhood of Baghdad on Monday, the eve of the Eid al-Adha festival, security and hospital sources said.

Muslim pilgrims ascended Saudi Arabia’s Mount Arafat yesterday in the high point of this year’s hajj, being held in downsized form and under coronavirus restrictions for the second year running.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday hit out an EU court ruling allowing employers in some cases to ban staff from wearing headscarves at work.

Spyware Pegasus, which is sold by the NSO Group of Israel, may have been used to conduct surveillance on about 300 Indians, including two serving Cabinet ministers at the Centre, three opposition leaders, a Constitutional authority, government officials, scientists and about 40 journalists, according to French media nonprofit, Forbidden Stories, and Amnesty International.

Researchers believe that early versions of the hacking software, first detected in 2016, used booby-trapped text messages to install itself onto the phones of targets.  The recipient would have to click on a link in the message in order for the spyware to download.

Hajj pilgrims streamed out of the holy city of Makkah and into the Mina valley yesterday, launching the rituals of the great pilgrimage which Saudi Arabia is holding in a scaled-down form for a second year.

Syrian regime artillery fire killed seven civilians including three children in the country’s last major rebel bastion of Idlib, a Britain-based war monitor said yesterday.

The United States on Saturday accused Tehran of an “outrageous” effort to deflect blame for the impasse in Iran nuclear talks and denied that any agreement had been reached on a prisoner swap.

President Bashar al-Assad took the oath of office for a fourth term in war-ravaged Syria on Saturday, after officially winning 95 percent of the vote in an election dismissed abroad.

Pilgrims began arriving in the holy city of Makkah yesterday for the second downsized hajj staged during the coronavirus pandemic, circling Islam’s holiest site in masks and on distanced paths. 

Syrian President Bashar Assad was sworn in Saturday for a fourth seven-year term in the war-torn country.

Ankara said Thursday it had uncovered a mass grave containing dozens of bodies in a Turkish-held region of Syria, accusing a US-backed Kurdish militia of the killings.

A spyware campaign using tools from a secretive Israeli firm was used to attack and impersonate dozens of human rights activists, journalists, dissidents, politicians and others, researchers said Thursday.