Some 2,000 mostly-Syrian refugees spent a rainy night stranded in no-man's land between Greece and Macedonia as hundreds more began arriving Saturday on their way to western Europe.

The refugees and migrants, who have been there since Thursday, spent the night sleeping on the ground despite heavy rain and temperatures which fell sharply during the night.

Macedonian riot police on Friday fired stun grenades to drive back thousands of mostly Syrian refugees stuck in no-man's land between Greece and Macedonia, the latest flashpoint in Europe's escalating migrant crisis.

At least eight people were hurt near the Greek border village of Edomeni as the police in riot gear beat the migrants back with truncheons and threw the stun grenades, devices that produce a blinding flash of light and a huge noise to disorient their targets.

Turkey's government is seeking to extend for one more year a parliamentary mandate that allows the military to combat Islamist jihadists and Kurdish militants in neighboring Syria and Iraq, a foreign ministry official said on Friday.

The current mandate under which the Turkish armed forces launched airstrikes in Iraq and Syria expires on October 2, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The Lebanese General Security on Friday announced arresting a young man who tried to travel to Turkey to join the extremist Islamic State group, which has seized vast swathes of Syria and Iraq.

“As part of its efforts to monitor the activities of terrorist groups, especially militants who brainwash Lebanese youths into joining and fighting alongside such groups, the General Directorate of General Security arrested Lebanese national O. H.,” it said in a statement.

Israel said it carried out an air raid Friday that killed up to five Iran-backed militants it said were behind a rare rocket attack from across the border in Syria.

The strike came a day after Israel launched a dozen air raids on the Syrian-side of the occupied Golan Heights, raising concerns about a possible escalation.

When the paths of an injured Syrian opposition activist, a disenchanted Kurdish youth and a regime loyalist converge on a ferry traveling across the Aegean Sea to Athens, they barely talk to each other.

It's a painful symbol of the Syrian war that the three struggle to forget even now that they are literally in the same boat heading towards an unknown future.

Australia is considering a request from the United States to extend its air campaign against the Islamic State group in Iraq into Syria, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Friday.

The United States has been leading a coalition of Western and Arab powers carrying out air strikes against IS fighters in Syria and Iraq since last year.

Iran is seeking to transfer state-of the-art weaponry from storehouses in Syria to Hizbullah, the Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold told The Jerusalem Post from Berlin.

The weapons include the SA-22 (Pantsir- S1) air defense system and the Y‑akhont anti-ship cruise missile, said Gold, who is on his first trip to a European capital for high-level talks.

Ten Malaysians have been arrested for fostering suspected links with the Islamic State group and planning attacks in the country, police said.

Malaysia's national police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said late Thursday that the 10 individuals were allegedly "planning to obtain weapons to launch attacks in the country and arrange logistics for Malaysians to join the IS in Syria".

Israeli air raids on a Syrian army position in the Golan Heights killed one person and wounded seven others, a Syrian military source said Friday.

"The enemy aircraft struck a military position in the area of Quneitra at 11:30 pm (2030 GMT Thursday), martyring one and wounding seven soldiers," said the source, quoted by the official news agency SANA.