A copy of the largest book of vast and panoramic photographs of travels through the Middle East ever published was sold at auction on Monday for over £330,000.

A senior figure in the Israeli army has warned that Syria is home to "the world's largest arsenal of chemical weapons".

Speaking at a ceremony to mark three decades since the battle of Sultan Yacoub between Israeli and Syrian troops during the first Lebanon war, Maj Gen Yair Naveh cautioned that little had changed in the intervening period.

Syria and Iran have been ordered by a US court to pay £200 million to the family of a Florida teenager who was killed in a suicide bomb attack in a Tel Aviv.

Daniel Wultz was 16 when he was killed in the Islamic Jihad attack on a restaurant during the Pesach holiday. Eleven people died in the blast, and Daniel's father, Yekutiel, was severely wounded.

Pro-Palestinian activists Viva Palestina are to send a convoy of trucks through Syria to Gaza – despite protests and withdrawals from their own members.

The charity, co-founded by Respect MP George Galloway, launched the convoy which departed last Sunday from the UK.

The first cousin of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has welcomed the possibility of a future democratic Syria making peace with Israel.

Ribal al-Assad, 36, whose father is the exiled former vice-president Rifaat al-Assad, said in an interview with the JC that most Syrians were interested primarily in peace and prosperity.

Reading through the seemingly endless list of resolutions adopted against Israel on March 22 at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the first impression was the same as it always is.