The Israeli parliament voted Thursday to oppose a Palestinian state as an "existential threat", a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told lawmakers the army had Hamas "by the throat".
The vote, which drew swift criticism from the Palestinian leadership and the international community, is largely symbolic but laid down a marker ahead of a planned address by Netanyahu to the US Congress next Wednesday.
Polio has been detected in samples of sewage that is starting to take over Gaza in the grip of a devastating war, health authorities in the Hamas-run territory and Israel said Thursday.
The announcement came after a European activist group released a report saying the Gaza Strip is "drowning" in hundreds of thousands of tonnes of human waste and rubble from the Israel-Hamas war.
The Gaza ministry said thousands of people in crowded tent cities of war-displaced were now at risk of contracting the highly infectious disease, which can cause deformities and paralysis.
Israeli strikes on Thursday killed at least five people, including the commander of a Hamas-allied group in Lebanon, militant groups and a security source said.
Since Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel sparked war in Gaza, Israel has repeatedly targeted militants of Jamaa Islamiya, whose armed wing has launched attacks on Israel from southern Lebanon over the past nine months.
A Lebanese security source said that an Israeli strike on a house near the southern village of Jmaijmeh killed three people and wounded several more.
When Shaheen Jarkas fled Syria's war for Lebanon, he hoped his family would be safe. Instead, a strike blamed on Israel killed his two young children, the latest casualties of months of cross-border violence.
"Like every day... the children were spending their day playing," said Jarkas, 55, a farm worker originally from north Syria's Afrin area but now living in the southern border village of Umm Toot.
"I heard the sound of a strike" and ran towards it, he said.
Jarkas said he found his children, Jean, 10, and Mohammed, seven, "drowning in blood".
A Saudi dissident seeking asylum in Bulgaria said Wednesday he had begun an indefinite hunger strike to secure his release from detention.
"I began an open-ended hunger strike on July 5 in protest of the Bulgarian authorities' violation of my human rights, European laws, and international treaties," Abd al-Rahman al-Khalidi told AFP.
He was speaking by phone from the detention centre in Sofia where he has been held for nearly three years.
He called on Bulgarian authorities to "immediately and unconditionally release" him.
Israel kept up its air strikes on Gaza Wednesday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to ramp up the pressure on Hamas as hopes faded for a US-announced ceasefire plan.
Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh accused Israel of deliberately undermining negotiations for a truce and hostage release deal because it did not want to end the war.
The Israeli military said it had carried out 25 strikes in 24 hours, targeting "military structures, terrorist infrastructure, terrorist cells and rigged structures".
On a hillside near Palestinian landowner Olayan Olayan's olive groves, young Israeli settlers are hammering out a new, illegal outpost in a UNESCO-protected zone.
Olayan and his neighbours have long battled attempts to settle the land in Battir, a heritage site in the Israeli-occupied West Bank famed for its ancient stone terraces.
Israeli construction in the West Bank has boomed since the war began in the Gaza Strip, even though all settlements in the territory are considered illegal under international law.
The families of five Israeli women soldiers held hostage in Gaza since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Tuesday pleaded with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make an accord for their release before he goes to Washington next week.
Facing mounting international and domestic criticism, Netanyahu is set to speak to a joint meeting of the US Congress on July 24 and to meet President Joe Biden. The families released new pictures of the detainees to increase pressure on Netanyahu.
Hamas led other Palestinian armed groups in committing hundreds of war crimes in the surprise October 7 attack on Israel that set off the Gaza war, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Wednesday.
Hamas reacted with fury to one of the most in-depth international studies on the unprecedented incursion into southern Israel, demanding that HRW withdraw the report and "apologise".
The report set out a host of crimes under international law that it says Hamas and its allies breached.
Ultra-Orthodox protesters fought police near Tel Aviv on Tuesday hours after Israel's military said it would begin issuing draft notices for men in the religious Jewish community within days.
Historically exempt from compulsory military service, ultra-Orthodox seminary students are being called up as Israel's war in Gaza and potential conflict with Hezbollah on the northern border saps resources and fuels resentment against those who do not have to serve.
