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WASHINGTON — As talks on an Iran nuclear deal enter the final stretch, US lawmakers are sharpening warnings against a "weak" agreement and laying down red lines that, if crossed, could prompt Congress to trip up a carefully crafted international pact.

Several influential lawmakers said they do not want to see any sanctions lifted before Tehran begins complying with a deal, and want a tough verification regime, in which inspectors could visit Iranian facilities anytime and anywhere.

They also want Tehran to reveal past military dimensions of its nuclear programme, particularly after Secretary of State John Kerry seemed to soften the US stance last week, by saying Iran would not be pressed on this point.

"I have become more and more concerned with the direction of these negotiations and the potential red lines that may be crossed," said Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Countering such concerns, officials said Thursday that Kerry had phoned Iran's foreign minister to say that Tehran must answer questions about whether its past atomic research was arms-related if it wants a deal.

Corker authored a bill giving Congress the right to approve or disapprove of any final agreement that emerges from talks between six major powers and Iran. Kerry travels to Vienna on Friday for the latest round.

Deadline

The talks are expected to drag past a self-imposed June 30 deadline to end nearly two years of negotiations aimed at restricting Iran's nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief.

But a senior US official said Thursday negotiators could see a way to a very good nuclear agreement.

President Barack Obama signed the Corker bill into law last month after the White House failed to persuade enough of his fellow Democrats not to join Republicans in demanding a say.

As the deadline nears, lawmakers are under pressure not to support an agreement that gives much ground to Tehran.

AIPAC, the influential pro-Israel lobby, has been pushing its concerns that a pact could be "fundamentally flawed".

J Street, a more moderate pro-Israel group, has launched its own campaign rebutting arguments made by deal opponents.

Several other groups are spending millions of dollars on advertising, urging lawmakers to take a hard line.

"There is tremendous scepticism about this deal ... and some Democrats from heavily pro-Israel communities are going to have a tough time with this," Republican Senator John McCain said.

Several prominent American security advisers, including five with ties to Obama's first term, warned in an open letter that a deal risked failing to provide adequate safeguards.

"Good for them," John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House, told a news conference on Thursday. "We're about to get stuck with a bad deal, with a bad regime."

Issue of inspections

Even if there are 60 votes in the Senate and a majority in the House to advance a resolution of disapproval, the measure would almost certainly face an Obama veto.

To get the two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress to override a veto, deal opponents would need at least 13 Democrats in the Senate and 43 in the House to vote against Obama.

That appears unlikely, but significant weaknesses in a final pact would make it less so, lawmakers from both sides said.

The congressional demands for a watertight deal put US negotiators under additional pressure not to give Iran much leeway.

Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat, said a deal would be a "non-starter" for him if, for example, Iran refused to allow inspections on military bases.

"The two biggest issues for people will be the intrusive nature of the inspections and how comprehensive they are, and the timing of sanctions relief," he said.

Western officials say inspections of military sites are critical to checking whether Iran is pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons programme.

Concerns on Capitol Hill were heightened this week when Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled out inspections of military sites and said sanctions must be lifted as soon as a deal is reached.

"It would be better if there were encouraging statements coming out of Tehran," said Representative Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

"Then we would feel at least that maybe they do want to change their attitudes and maybe we should change some of our attitudes, too, but I haven't seen it."

Corker's "Iran Nuclear Review Act of 2015" passed the Senate by 98-1 and the House by 400-25.

Tough sell

It gives the Obama administration until July 9 to transmit a final nuclear deal to Congress, triggering a 30-day period in which the Senate and House can consider a resolution approving it, vote on a resolution of disapproval or have no vote at all.

The measure bars Obama from waiving any sanctions on Iran approved by Congress during the review period, plus 22 days if Congress passes a disapproval resolution and Obama vetoes it.

If a resolution of disapproval survived a veto, Obama would be barred from waiving congressional sanctions. Since those account for the vast majority of US sanctions, it could cripple any nuclear deal.

The review period doubles to 60 days if Congress gets a deal between July 10 and September 7. If there were no deal by September 7, legislators would seek to pass additional sanctions.

Several Democrats said they were confident most of their party would be comfortable approving a deal largely similar to a framework pact announced in April.

But they acknowledge any pact will be a tough sell across the aisle.

"The majority of Republicans are going to vote against anything that has President Obama's signature on it," Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said. 

PARIS — France's $3 billion Saudi-funded deal to provide military supplies to Lebanon has not been cancelled, the Saudi foreign minister said Wednesday, despite delays caused by concerns that weapons could end up in the wrong hands.

"There is an agreement... there is no blockage. Everything is proceeding normally," said Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir during a visit to Paris. 

Lebanon received the first tranche of weapons designed to bolster its army against jihadist threats, including anti-tank guided missiles, in April, but press reports have since indicated that the $3-billion (2.7-billion euro) programme has run into obstacles. 

On Wednesday, a French diplomatic source denied the deal had been cancelled but said there were delays. 

"It is being evaluated at the request of the Saudis for political reasons because Saudi Arabia is extremely cautious on the issue that these materials go only to the Lebanese army," the source said.

"The Saudis want guarantees that this material is not diverted to other forces."

Lebanon's Shiite movement Hizbollah, which plays a key role in Lebanese politics, is backed by Saudi Arabia's chief regional rival Iran. 

It backs the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, while the Saudis back the Sunni rebel opposition. 

"The work is ongoing but we are confident that the programme will be put into practice in all its dimensions," said the diplomatic source. 

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel on Thursday released a prominent Hamas leader in the West Bank, the Islamist group said, a year after his arrest along with hundreds of others following the killing of three Israeli settlers.

Hamas says Hassan Yusef, who has spent years in Israeli jails and was elected to the Palestinian parliament in 2006 while in Israeli custody, has worked entirely in the political wing of the movement.

He is also known for having disowned his son after he worked as an informant for Israel's Shin Bet internal security agency under the codename "The Green Prince".

"Occupation forces [Israel] on Thursday released Hassan Yusef after he was in administrative detention for an entire year," Hamas said in a news report on its website, Hamas.ps.

Israel's military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The army arrested Yusef, who was born in 1954, in June 2014 as part of a roundup of hundreds of members of the group in the occupied West Bank, Hamas said.

The arrests followed the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli settlers in the West Bank, which the Israeli government blamed on Hamas.

Those incidents and the brutal revenge killing of a Palestinian boy in East Jerusalem the following month by suspected Jewish extremists triggered events that led to a 50-day war between Israel and Hamas in the group's stronghold, the Gaza Strip.

Yusef's 36-year-old son, Mosab Hassan Yusef, admitted several years ago to being a top informer for Israel's domestic security service during the second Palestinian Intifada (uprising) that began in 2000, when Hamas carried out dozens of suicide bombings against Israel.

Under administrative detention, a procedure dating back to the British mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948, prisoners can be held for indefinitely renewable six-month periods without charge.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — A joint Israeli-Palestinian poll published Thursday shows dwindling support on both sides for a Palestinian state alongside Israel as a solution to the conflict.

The survey, by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, shows 51 per cent of Israeli respondents in favour of what is known as the two-state solution, down from 62 per cent last June.

Support among Palestinians was also 51 per cent, down from 54 per cent a year ago.

Shortly after the previous survey, Israel fought a war in the Gaza Strip that killed some 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and 73 on the Israeli side, mostly soldiers.

And in March 2015 Israel voted into power a government consisting largely of nationalist patrons of West Bank Jewish settlement, the ultra-Orthodox and opponents of Palestinian statehood. 

"After forming a right wing government in Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu, we asked both sides about their expectations for the future," a Hebrew University statement said.

"The level of perceived threat on both sides regarding the aspirations of the other side in the long run is very high."

"Fifty-six per cent of Palestinians think that Israel's goals are to extend its borders to cover all the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and expel its Arab citizens, and 25 per cent think Israel's goals are to annex the West Bank while denying political rights to the Palestinians."

"Forty-three per cent of Israelis think that Palestinians' aspirations in the long run are to conquer the State of Israel and destroy much of the Jewish population.

It did not give comparisons with the 2014 poll.

The survey, which questioned 1,200 Palestinians and 802 Israelis, had a margin of error of three percentage points.

Netanyahu sparked international concern during the election campaign when he ruled out the establishment of a Palestinian state.

He later tried to backtrack but US President Barack Obama was not convinced.

"The danger here is that Israel as a whole loses credibility," Obama said in an interview with Israel's Channel 2 television broadcast on June 2. "Already, the international community does not believe that Israel is serious about a two-state solution," he said.

PARIS — France said Wednesday it would look into building two nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia as part of a multi-billion-euro package of deals, days before the deadline of nuclear talks with the kingdom's rival, Iran.

A feasibility study will be carried out to build two European pressurised reactors in Saudi Arabia, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announced after a meeting with Saudi Defence Minister Prince Mohamad Bin Salman in Paris.

The announcement came as talks with Iran go to the wire ahead of the June 30 deadline. 

World powers are looking for guarantees that Iran's nuclear programme will remain purely for civil energy purposes, and does not lead to a bomb or trigger an arms race with its regional competitors, particularly the Saudis.

In addition to the feasibility study, France will sign an agreement to train the Saudis on nuclear safety and the treatment of nuclear waste. 

A French diplomatic source told AFP that if the nuclear reactors are built the deal would be worth at least $10 billion. 

A slew of other deals — totalling some $12 billion (10.7 billion euros) — were also finalised during the first "Franco-Saudi Joint Commission" meeting, including the sale of 23 H-145 multipurpose helicopters for 500 million euros and a commitment from the Saudis to buy 30 patrol boats for its navy. 

"It represents the creation of many jobs and hundreds of millions of euros," Fabius added

Fabius also mentioned the Saudi Arabian Airlines order for 50 Airbus passenger planes valued at $8 billion, first announced at last week's Paris Air Show.

France has been reinforcing links with the conservative kingdom despite persistent criticism of its human rights record, while Riyadh is keen to broaden its ties with Western powers beyond its traditional alliance with the United States.

Prince Mohammad also met French President Francois Hollande later on Wednesday.

Saudi Arabia has been under international pressure, including from Washington and Paris, to drop a sentence of 1,000 lashes for a renowned human rights activist and blogger.

The kingdom has also faced criticism over its use of the death penalty. According to an AFP count, Saudi Arabia executed 102 locals and foreigners in the year to mid-June, compared with 87 during all of 2014.

Saudi Arabia's supreme court has confirmed death sentences for two suspected Saudi Al Qaeda members convicted of murdering four Frenchmen in 2007, according to press reports.

The pair were convicted of shooting dead the French nationals — one of whom was a teenager — near the western city of Medina while they were on a desert excursion from their homes in the capital Riyadh.

SANAA/DUBAI  — Eight-year-old Abdullah Musleh lay screaming in pain in a Sanaa hospital on Wednesday as a doctor cleaned his torn face, the victim of a worsening war that threatens millions of Yemenis with starvation and homelessness.

"We were at home when air strikes hit the missile base on the mountain near our house," Abdullah's father Ali said by his bedside, describing an air raid on an arms depot a month ago that sent missiles raining across part of Yemen's capital.

"Shells from the base started flying over the houses. We tried to make our escape but, when we were in the street, a piece of shrapnel hit my son. Thank God the doctors were able to remove it, but he needs more help."

A country that was already by far the poorest and most unstable on the Arabian Peninsula is now, after three months of conflict, in the grip of a humanitarian disaster.

Cut off from the world, living under bombardment from a Saudi-led coalition and beset by fighting between multiple battalions and militias, Yemen's 25 million people are prey to hunger, disease and an ever-present fear of death.

"The most terrifying thing, worse than anything we've suffered in this war, is the indiscriminate shelling that falls on us every day," said Saleh Hashem, a retired teacher from Aden.

In war-torn districts of the southern port city, mountains of rubbish fester in heat of over 40oC, helping to fuel an outbreak of dengue fever that has infected over 3,000 people nationwide, according to the United Nations.

Tanks and snipers

Snipers flit across rooftops and tanks heave into the abandoned streets, spitting out shells seemingly around the clock as residents huddle indoors.

"You don't know where it will come from, and you know it could kill you and your family any moment, just as it kills women and children every single day," Hashem said.

When Yemen's now-dominant Houthi movement advanced toward Aden in late March, a Saudi-led alliance of Arab states began bombing in a bid to restore the elected president, who is backed by Saudi Arabia and has fled to Riyadh.

While the intervention held up the Houthi advance, it failed to push the militia back again, leaving large numbers of civilians trapped between battle lines across southern Yemen.

The Houthis say their advance is part of a revolution against a corrupt government and against Islamic militants.

Saudi Arabia, determined to thwart any arms deliveries to the Houthis, has imposed a near total blockade on a country heavily reliant on imports, reducing supplies of food, fuel and medicine to a trickle. Some families are breaking their daily fast for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan — meant to be a time of joy and plenty — with rice, bread and canned fish.

And, after a wave of deadly car bomb attacks claimed by Daesh on mosques in Sanaa, many of the faithful in the capital say their prayers at home.

Three thousand have perished in the war, over a million have fled their homes and more than half of the population do not have reliable access to food, according to UN figures.

"Yemen is also dependent on imports for 90 per cent of its food. What food and fuel does make it in is then not being distributed to where it is needed, because it is blocked by fighting on the ground," Britain's international development secretary, Justine Greening, said this week.

Risk of starvation

"Thousands of Yemenis have already lost their lives in this latest wave of violence — but millions more are at risk of starving by the end of the year."

With half of Yemen's population under 18, the trauma of war is taking an especially heavy toll on children.

Jets swooping low and anti-aircraft guns blazing from civilian neighbourhoods elicit little screams from inside homes, and parents complain that their small children are rendered variously distant and silent or hysterical by the constant blasts.

For the nearly 16,000 people wounded in the conflict, there is little chance of proper medical treatment.

"If a child is wounded, a number of horrendous obstacles stands in the way of getting him treated," Jeremy Hopkins of the UN children's fund UNICEF said in Sanaa.

"The lack of fuel makes getting to a hospital very difficult, as gas is so scarce that queues at gas stations are three deep and several kilometres long.

"If they actually get to a health centre, there may be no fuel to run it, there may be no drugs because they're not coming into the country. And hospitals are understaffed," he said.

Hisham Abdul Aziz is homeless after rockets missed an army base in the capital Sanaa and hit his house instead. Sending his family to the countryside for their safety, he stays on alone, disconsolate, to go to work.

"Everything in the house has been destroyed," he said. "After the war stops, I'll need so much time and money to get back to where I was. Nothing's left in Yemen that hasn't been destroyed."

BENGHAZI, Libya — Libya's elected parliament has voted to stay in United Nations peace talks after calling for amendments to a proposed power-sharing deal aimed at ending the conflict between the country's two rival governments.

An internationally recognised government and elected House of Representatives operates in the east while a self-declared government and the re-instated former parliament known as the General National Congress or GNC holds the capital Tripoli.

"The House of Representatives agreed on amendments of the last draft by the UN with 66 out of 76 members voting," lawmaker Tareq Al Jouroushi told Reuters on Wednesday.

Libya has been sliding deeper into chaos, worrying Western powers who fear it will become a failed state just over the Mediterrean sea from mainland Europe. Militants allied to Daesh terror group have also gained ground in the chaos.

After months of negotiations in Europe, Algeria and Morocco, the UN talks are at a delicate stage with fighting continuing on the ground.

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives split over whether to continue with the UN negotiations after disagreements over parts of the power-sharing accord, which calls for creation of a second chamber.

Jourousi said HOR ammendments included watering down the powers of the proposed second body, and also making its membership more balanced between the two factions.

A GNC lawmaker told Reuters their negotiating team planned to head back to Morocco for another round of talks this week. It also had its own amendments to the draft.

The UN proposal calls for a one-year-long government of national accord, where a council of ministers headed by a prime minister with two deputies will have executive authority.

It says the House of Representatives will be the legislative body, but a 120-member State Council consultative body will also be created and 90 members will come from the Tripoli GNC congress.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel said Wednesday it was revoking permits for 500 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to enter Jerusalem ahead of Friday prayers because of rocket fire from the Palestinian enclave.

A spokeswoman for COGAT, the defence ministry unit which coordinates with Gaza, told AFP the move to cancel part of its measures easing restrictions on Palestinians during the holy month of Ramadan applied to this week only and was "because of the rocket" which hit southern Israel on Tuesday night, causing no injuries.

Israel had relaxed restrictions on the movement of Palestinians to and from the West Bank and Gaza Strip ahead of Ramadan which began last week, including letting up to 800 Gazans enter Jerusalem for prayers at Al Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, each Friday of the month.

The defence ministry had said the measures were conditional on a continued lull in violence, which was broken late Friday with the killing of an Israeli hiker in the West Bank and the stabbing of a security officer in East Jerusalem on Sunday.

Israel had on Sunday revoked entry permits for residents of the West Bank village home to the Palestinian who had stabbed the officer.

It also cancelled permission for 500 West Bank Palestinians to fly via Israel's Ben Gurion airport.

Israeli aircraft had struck in Gaza following Tuesday's rocket attack, with Palestinian security sources saying the raid hit farmland in northern Gaza, causing no injuries or damage.

It was the fifth such incident in just under a month, and was claimed — like all recent incidents of firing on southern Israel — by a radical Islamist organisation loosely allied with the Daesh terror group.

Israel says it holds Hamas, the Islamist movement which de facto rules the Gaza Strip, responsible for any fire from its territory.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon said Tuesday that there are some Shiite fighters at an Iraqi military base where Washington just sent 450 reinforcements, but they were not working with US forces, underscoring concerns over links with the sectarian fighters.

Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren said that while there is a "small group" of Shiite fighters at the Taqaddum base, there numbered only in the lower double digits, did not form full units and did not interact with US forces. 

Taqaddum is a key area in the fight to retake the city of Ramadi and the Sunni province of Al Anbar from the Daesh terror group.

Shiite and Kurdish fighters have been critical in bolstering a weakened Iraqi military in efforts to fight Daesh. But the United States is hesitant to see Shiite militias involved in its efforts to battle Daesh, despite their battle readiness.

Many of the forces are backed by US-rival Iran and the military has not forgotten intense fighting with Shiite groups after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq.

The US and international observers also fret that such militias could spark sectarian fighting during campaigns.

In its annual report on terrorism released Friday, the US said Tehran continues to "sponsor terrorist groups around the world".

Warren said the Shiite fighters are coordinating with Iraq government forces at the strategic base, and that the US made it a condition of troop deployment to the airbase that Shiite militia units be withdrawn.

"There were Shia militias units on Taqaddum at one point," Warren added. But "one of the conditions for our arrival there was that these units move off Taqaddum airbase".

Daesh launched a brutal offensive last June that overran large areas north and west of Baghdad.

Iraqi forces have made gains in Diyala and Salaheddin provinces north of Baghdad, but much of the country's west is still in Daesh hands. 

BEIRUT — Two suicide bombers from the Daesh group have killed 10 Syrian soldiers in the northeastern city of Hasakeh, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Wednesday. Separately, at least 13 civilians were killed in a car bomb attack against a mosque in a village near the capital Damascus, the monitor said.

All three incidents occurred Tuesday night.

"Ten soldiers were killed and 16 others injured in two suicide attacks carried out by Daesh against army positions in Hasakeh," the Britain-based observatory said.

"The first attack was carried out by three jihadists against a military barracks in the centre of town, while the second was carried out by one suicide bomber against a checkpoint near a children's hospital."

A third suicide bomber hit a post manned by the Kurdish security forces in the city, causing serious damage to buildings in the area but no deaths.

Control of Hasakeh, which is ethnically mixed, is divided between Syrian troops and Kurdish forces.

Elsewhere in the country, the observatory said 13 civilians were killed when a car bomb exploded in front of a mosque in the village of Al-Tall as worshippers were leaving prayers.

State news agency SANA reported the "terrorist" blast that targeted the mosque, but gave no precise toll.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack in the town, which lies just north of the capital, where a truce is in place between rebel forces inside and regime troops outside.