Israeli fighter jets have continued attacking high-rise buildings and other targets in the Gaza Strip as Palestinians on Thursday marked the Eid al-Fitr religious holiday under relentless aerial bombardment.

Since the Israeli offensive began late on Monday, Gaza’s health ministry says at least 84 people, including 17 children, have been killed. More than 480 others have been wounded.

An announcement by the Taliban that they would cease-fire for three days for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr has been met by many Afghans with little but despair, just days after a bombing that killed at least 80 people, most of them schoolgirls.

The insurgents said late on Sunday they were offering the pause in fighting so Afghans could celebrate Eid in peace. The truce is meant to come into force this morning, at a critical moment with US forces in the process of withdrawing after 20 years.

China has turned its far western region of Xinjiang into an “open-air prison” for Uighur Muslims a United States official has said as the US released an annual report on the state of religious freedoms worldwide.

The Chinese government has turned “the entire region into an open-air prison,” said Daniel Nadel the director of the US State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom on Wednesday.

The UN Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to extend the mandate of the nearly 3,700-strong peacekeeping force in the disputed Abyei region on the Sudan-South Sudan border until November 15.

It also asked Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to provide recommendations for reconfiguring and ending the mission, although Guterres informed the council early last month that he could not provide such options because of differences between the two countries.

The United Nations has confirmed that military forces are impeding humanitarian access to parts of Ethiopia's war-torn Tigray region, after an exclusive CNN investigation revealed that Eritrean troops were coordinating with Ethiopian forces to cut off critical aid routes.

After three consecutive nights of Israeli security forces raiding the Al Aqsa Mosque during prayers and weeks of police trying to stop Palestinians from accessing the Old City during the holy month of Ramadan, occupied East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank are on a knife’s edge.

The past few days have seen sit-ins and protests by Palestinians angry at the impending forced expulsion of a number of Palestinian families from their homes in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, one of many neighborhoods whose residents are finding themselves expelled.

A French court has thrown out a bid by a former journalist to hold companies to account for supplying the toxic herbicide “Agent Orange” during the Vietnam War.

Tran To Nga, 79, wanted 14 agrochemical giants including Bayer-Monsanto and Dow Chemical put on trial for the crime of ecocide—destroying the environment.

However, the court in Evry, near Paris, declined to hear the case. It said it had no jurisdiction over the wartime actions of the U.S. government.

The death toll in a bomb attack that targeted schoolgirls in Kabul on Saturday has risen to 85, Afghan officials told CNN on Monday.

Another 147 people were wounded in the attack in front of the Sayed Al-Shuhada school, said Danish Hedayat, head of media for the second vice president of Afghanistan.

A car bomb was detonated in the neighborhood of Dasht-e-Barchi, and two more bombs exploded when students rushed out in panic. There has been no official claim of responsibility yet. The Taliban has denied being behind Saturday evening’s blasts.

A meeting between Colombian protest leaders and President Ivan Duque broke up on Monday with little sign of progress on curbing nearly two weeks of sometimes deadly anti-government protests.

Protest leaders said the government had not shown empathy for their demands, while the government emphasized the meeting was exploratory and said it wanted to reach agreements with demonstrators.

South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir has dissolved parliament, opening the way for lawmakers from opposing sides of the country’s civil war to be appointed under a 2018 peace accord.

Kiir’s decision was announced on public television on Saturday evening but no date was given as to when the new parliament will begin working.