The Chinese government has sentenced six people to death, for helping organise an attack on a market in its restive Uyghur province earlier this year, which left 39 people dead.

Two others were given death penalties for another attack on a railway station in the provincial capital Urumqi.

The exiled World Uyghur Congress has blamed the violence on the central government's policies, which the group says repress the local culture.

The Xinjiang province, originally inhabited by the Uyghur, a Turkic people following Islam, has seen violence escalate over recent months, with scores left dead in regular attacks, blamed by Beijing on terrorists, however experts say the violence is also rooted in the social and economic exclusion of Uyghur.

China has systematically settled Han Chinese in the region, in an effort to rebalance the ethnic makeup of the Xinjiang province. In November the government announced it would deploy thousands of former soldiers in Xinjiang, to counter the increasing violence.

The Israeli air force's attacks on four high rise buildings in the Gaza strip amounted to war crimes, a new report by Amnesty International says.

The report, which focused exclusively on these attacks in which no one died, says the destruction by Israel was extensive and “appeared to be wanton”, for no military reasons.

"All the evidence we have shows this large-scale destruction was carried out deliberately and with no military justification," said Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa director, Philip Luther.

"Both the facts on the ground and statements made by Israeli military spokespeople at the time indicate that the attacks were a collective punishment against the people of Gaza and were designed to destroy their already precarious livelihoods."

The Canadian government has closed its embassy in the Egyptian capital Cairo over "security concerns", a day after the British mission in the city closed.

Canada's Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney said in a statement that Canadians must remain vigilant.

"That is why we are taking part in the coalition that is currently conducting air strikes against ISIL [ISIS], and supporting the security forces in Iraq in their fight against this terrorist scourge," he said.

The International Criminal Court accepted the status of Palestine as a ‘non-state party observer,’ that could allow for war crimes investigation into crimes committed in Palestinian territories, reports the New York Times.

The recognition of Palestine allows it to ratify the Rome Statute, which will allow the International Criminal Court to investigate and prosecute those responsible for war crimes committed on Palestinian land.