The United States military says it has killed a leader of the ISIL (ISIS) group in eastern Syria in a drone strike. The strike on Friday resulted in the death of Osama al-Muhajer, the US Central Command said in a statement on Sunday. "We have made it clear that we remain committed to the defeat of ISIS throughout the region," US Central Command (CENTCOM) chief General Michael Kurilla said, using another acronym for the ISIL armed group. "ISIS remains a threat, not only to the region but well beyond," he added. According to CENTCOM, no civilians were killed in the operation but coalition forces are "assessing reports of a civilian injury".

Pro-Iranian forces in Syria have said they have a "long arm" to respond to further United States air strikes on their positions, after tit-for-tat missile and drone attacks in Syria over the last 24 hours. The online statement, released late on Friday and signed by the Iranian Advisory Committee in Syria, said US air strikes had left several of their fighters dead and wounded, without specifying the fighters' nationality. "We have the capability to respond if our centres and forces in Syria are targeted," the statement said. On Friday night, two Syrian opposition activist groups reported a new wave of US air attacks on eastern Syria, which hit positions of Iran-backed militias, after rockets were fired at bases in Syria housing US troops. Several US officials, however, denied that attacks were launched late on Friday.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. An explosion in eastern Syria on Wednesday killed at least three people, according to reports. A war monitoring group said the blast was likely caused by a drone strike that targeted Iran-backed militiamen. No group claimed responsibility for an attack in the area and reports about what had happened were sketchy.

Israeli settlers rampage through Palestinian villages, Syria's president is getting friendly with several Arab states, and attacks against African migrants in Tunisia. Here's your round up of our coverage, written by Abubakr Al-Shamahi, Al Jazeera Digital's Middle East and North Africa editor. With the backing of the United States, Israeli and Palestinian officials met at a Jordanian resort on Sunday in an attempt to reach a deal to end more than a year of intense violence. By the end of it, the two sides said they had agreed to work closely together, to bring about a "de-escalation on the ground". And, according to a joint statement, Israel even said it would suspend the building of any new settlement units in the occupied West Bank.

A drone attack hit a US-led coalition base in southern Syria, the US military's Central Command has said. "Three one-way attack drones attacked the al-Tanf Garrison in Syria," a CENTCOM statement said on Friday. Two of the drones were shot down by the coalition, but the third hit the compound, wounding two allied Syrian opposition fighters who received treatment, the statement added. "Attacks of this kind are unacceptable," CENTCOM spokesperson Joe Buccino said, without specifying who carried it out. "They place our troops and our partners at risk and jeopardise the fight against ISIL." There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

Ukraine's drone strikes on two air bases deep inside Russia mark a new chapter in this war, but their significance--whether they escalate the conflict or alter the war's course in some other way--is unclear. Much depends on Moscow's reaction, and Kyiv's response to that, in the next several days. For now, it's worth probing some possibilities, though first let's lay out the implications of these strikes, regardless of their consequences. The strikes followed several days of massive Russian air and missile attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets, mainly power plants, shutting off heat and electricity as Ukraine's winter is getting brutal. The Russians launched those attacks from the airfields that the Ukrainians subsequently hit.

United States officials believe Iran was behind a drone attack last week at a military outpost at al-Tanf in southern Syria where American troops are based. Officials said Monday the US believes that Iran provided resources and encouraged the attack, but that the drones were not launched from Iran, The Associated Press news service reported. The drones were Iranian, and Iran appears to have facilitated their use, officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss details that have not been made public. Officials said they believe the attacks involved as many as five drones laden with explosive charges, and that they hit both the US side of al-Tanf garrison and the side where Syrian opposition forces reside. There were no reported injuries or deaths as a result of the attack but it comes in a period of rising tensions between the US and Iran.

So as the United Nations, European authorities and human-rights groups build war-crimes cases, they have turned to a novel tool: artificial intelligence. With the regime of President Bashar al-Assad emerging largely victorious from nearly a decade of conflict, efforts to bring about some measure of accountability are gaining speed, largely in European courts. Since the beginning of Syria's conflict, activists on the ground risked their lives to document human-rights violations, from torture and attacks on protesters to indiscriminate rocket strikes and barrel bombs. Now, AI and machine learning could play an integral role in bringing war criminals to justice for Syria by helping to sort through the huge trove of evidence, and serve as a model for investigations into other modern-day conflicts. "You have a use of technology both to disseminate the information, capture it, and now to search it that is suddenly very different and changes the way you work," said Catherine Marchi-Uhel, who heads the United Nations body tasked with collecting Syrian evidence and building cases.

But the president's aspirations have long run into resistance, as his own national security officials argued that abandonment of such troubled countries could have catastrophic consequences -- such as when the United States pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2011, leaving a vacuum that fostered the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Mr. Trump has also repeatedly pushed to withdraw from Syria, but several hundred U.S. troops remain stationed there, partly to protect coveted oil fields held by American-backed Syrian Kurdish allies from being seized by the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. The current deliberations over withdrawals would not affect those in Syria, officials said. The plan under discussion to pull out of Somalia is said to not apply to U.S. forces stationed in nearby Kenya and Djibouti, where American drones that carry out airstrikes in Somalia are based, according to officials familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Keeping those air bases would mean retaining the military's ability to use drones to attack militants with the Shabab, the Qaeda-linked terrorist group -- at least those deemed to pose a threat to American interests.

The visit to Syria, a key ally of Iran, came amid soaring tensions in the Middle East between Iran and the United States. On Friday, a U.S. drone strike killed a top Iranian general who led forces supporting Assad in Syria's civil war. Iran has vowed revenge for the slaying, and with some 600 American troops deployed in Syria, the country is a potential site of conflict with Iran. While the official statements made no mention of the U.S. killing of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani on Friday, the timing was conspicuous. Soleimani had led Iran's armed support for Assad as armed rebels neared the capital, Damascus, and he helped seize key cities, preventing the collapse of Assad's state.