Hezbollah said it fired "dozens" of rockets Thursday at a military base in northern Israel in retaliation for Israeli strikes on Lebanon, announcing four of its fighters had been killed.

Fears of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah have risen in recent weeks as threats have intensified between the sides, which have traded regular cross-border fire since Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel sparked war in the Gaza Strip.

There is little Gaza's doctors can do to alleviate the pain that three-year-old Suhaib Khuzaiq still feels from a shrapnel injury that caused his leg to be amputated above the knee in December.

"He is in pain and in need of painkillers and a prosthetic limb that is only available outside Gaza", his father Ali Khuzaiq, 31, told AFP from Gaza City's Al-Ahli hospital where Suhaib receives treatment.

As the summer heat beats down on war-torn Gaza, Muhammad Bashir's skills are in high demand: he repairs rooftop water tanks that have been perforated by shrapnel and bullets.

Some of the leaky tanks in his workshop look like sieves.

"Before the war... we used to fix only one or two water tanks every month, but now we get dozens due to the occupation (Israeli forces) bombing of homes," he told AFP.

Two ultraconservative candidates have pulled out of Iran's Friday presidential vote, leaving four contenders including one reformist still in the race.

Tehran's ultraconservative mayor, Alireza Zakani, announced his withdrawal in a post on social media platform X on Thursday, after earlier denying he was ending his campaign.

Zakani's withdrawal came hours after a statement by the Ministry of Interior confirming the exit of Amirhossein Ghazizadeh-Hashemi, another ultraconservative.

In his post, Zakani urged two other candidates to unite.

Israel's military on Friday said it was conducting raids backed by air strikes in northern Gaza, killing "dozens" of militants in an area where it had declared the command structure of Hamas dismantled months ago.

The operation in Shujaiya, on the edge of Gaza City, caused numerous casualties, witnesses and medics said on Thursday when it began.

Renewed fighting in Gaza's north followed comments on Sunday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which he said the "intense phase" of the war was winding down after almost nine months.

In a sun-baked cemetery in northern Iraq, silence lingers over a forsaken corner devoid of mourners, where women killed in gender-based violence rest in unmarked graves.

Domestic violence and femicide have long plagued Iraq's conservative society, including through so-called "honour killings" -- the murders of women deemed to have breached patriarchal social norms, often at the hands of close relatives.

In the unmarked section of the Siwan cemetery in Sulaimaniyah, the second city of the autonomous Kurdistan region, many of the headstones are blank.

Patients in Gaza's few standing hospitals are dying in droves from infections resulting from a lack of protective gear and soap, even when they survive their horrific blast injuries.

And health workers are facing agonizing decisions, like giving up on a seven-year-old boy with extensive burns because bandages are in short supply and he'd have probably died anyway.

Israel and the United States said Wednesday they had made progress toward resolving a rift over US weapons shipments after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accused President Joe Biden's administration of slowing down deliveries.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met top officials over three days in Washington as he voiced hope for quietly working through disagreements with Israel's vital ally, drawing an implicit contrast to Netanyahu's more confrontational approach.

Paris judges on Wednesday confirmed a French arrest warrant for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad over alleged complicity in crimes against humanity for 2013 chemical attacks, the plaintiffs' lawyers said.

The Paris appeals court found Assad could be sought over deadly August 2013 attacks on Syrian soil with chemical weapons.

"This is a historic decision. It's the first time a national court has recognised that a sitting head of state does not have total personal immunity" for their actions, said the plaintiffs' lawyers Clemence Bectarte, Jeanne Sulzer and Clemence Witt.

Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin on Wednesday urged warring parties in the Middle East to accept "peace proposals", saying the region including Lebanon "doesn't need war".

"The Middle East is going through a critical moment," Parolin told a press conference in Beirut during a days-long visit to Lebanon.

The Holy See "asks for peace proposals to be welcomed, so that fighting stops on each side, so hostages in Gaza are released, so that the necessary aid arrives unhindered to the Palestinian population", he said.