U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday he did not believe that Israel would annex the West Bank, playing down this week's Knesset vote to advance two bills.

Rubio said Israeli lawmakers had held the vote as a political stunt to embarrass U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A Ukraine drone crashed into an apartment block in a Moscow suburb on Friday, wounding a young boy and four others, officials said, as both countries traded another night of aerial strikes.

Four people were killed in Israeli air strikes in eastern and southern Lebanon on Thursday, according to the country's health ministry, with the Israeli military saying it had attacked Hezbollah targets.

The ministry reported that strikes in mountainous areas in the east "resulted in an initial death toll of two" people.

Agence France-Presse renewed its call on Thursday on Israel to conduct a full investigation into an attack in 2023 that killed a Reuters journalist in Lebanon and wounded several others, two of them from AFP.

On October 13, 2023, an attack killed Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah and wounded six other journalists, including AFP reporters Dylan Collins and Christina Assi, who had to have her right leg amputated.

Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Thursday that Saudi Arabia should "keep riding camels" if it asks for a Palestinian state in exchange for normalizing ties with Israel.

"If Saudi Arabia tells us normalization in exchange for a Palestinian state, friends, no thank you", Smotrich said at a conference in Israel.

Syrian authorities have agreed a ceasefire with a group of jihadists led by Frenchman Oumar Diaby in northwest Syria, sources from both sides told AFP on Thursday.

Government forces surrounded the camp of Firqatul Ghuraba ("the Foreigners' Brigade") on Wednesday, leading to the first clashes with jihadists under Syria's new leadership since the ousting in December of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad.

The European Parliament on Thursday definitively adopted rules clamping down on pollution from the tiny pellets that constitute the building blocks of most plastic products.

The text introduces new rules to hold handling and transport firms accountable for spills of the lentil-sized pellets, called nurdles, which are used in everything from from car bumpers to salad bowls.

Oil prices jumped close to three percent in Asian trade on Thursday after U.S. President Donald Trump slapped sanctions on Russia's two largest oil companies.

West Texas Intermediate was up 2.89 percent at $60.19 while Brent crude jumped 2.86 percent to $64.38.

China said Thursday it "opposes" recent sanctions slapped by the United States on Russia's two largest oil companies over Moscow's war in Ukraine, saying they had "no basis in international law".

At the same press conference, foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun criticized sanctions on Russia agreed Wednesday by the European Union -- whose targets included Chinese companies -- insisting that "China is neither the creator of the Ukraine crisis nor a party to it".

U.S. Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday that the Gaza ceasefire brokered by Washington could pave the way for broader alliances for Israel in the Middle East.