A bill requiring Iran’s government to suspend nuclear inspections unless sanctions are lifted, and ignore other restraints on its nuclear programme agreed with major powers, was passed by the hardline-led parliament yesterday.

Iran said that Israel and an exiled opposition group used new and “complex” methods to assassinate its leading nuclear scientist, as it buried him Monday in a funeral befitting a top “martyr”.

Debate raged in Iran yesterday over how and when to respond to a top nuclear scientist’s assassination, blamed on Israel, as his body was honoured at shrines to prepare it for burial.

The World Health Organisation delivered 15 ventilators to Gaza hospitals yesterday amid a spike in Covid-19 infections that has tested the Palestinian territory’s under-developed health system.

Anti-government protesters defied lockdowns and the threat of violence to demonstrate yesterday in several Iraqi cities, with new clashes with security forces claiming the life of one protester.

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani Saturday accused Israel of acting as a "mercenary" for the US and seeking to create chaos, blaming it for the assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist.

Iran said one of its most prominent nuclear scientists was assassinated yesterday in an attack on his car outside Tehran that it accused arch foe Israel of being behind.

Salma al-Najjar, a petrol station attendant in the Gaza Strip, sees her part-time job in larger terms than the traditional act of filling a customer’s tank.

Iran’s supreme leader dismissed the prospect of new negotiations with the West yesterday, even as the Tehran government spoke optimistically about the return of foreign companies in “the absence of Trump” and his sanctions.

Palestinian fighters fired a rocket into Israel, drawing Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military said yesterday.

More than 60 prisoners broke out of a Lebanese jail on Saturday and five of them were killed when their car hit a tree while under pursuit, security sources and the state news agency said.

War-torn Yemen is in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen in decades, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned Friday.