Israel's military pounded central Gaza with heavy air strikes on Wednesday as US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators planned to resume talks on a truce and hostage release deal.

Tensions were high in annexed east Jerusalem where thousands of police were deployed to guard Israel's annual "flag march" that has sparked clashes between Jews and Arabs in previous years.

The bloodiest ever Gaza war, sparked by Hamas's October 7 attack on southern Israel, raged on unabated with jets bombing targets overnight and Palestinian officials reporting yet more deaths.

Living on canned beans and meat, the 70-year-old Egyptian has been hiding out in a Mecca apartment for weeks, hoping to evade a Saudi dragnet and perform the hajj pilgrimage illegally.

The man -- who asked to be identified only as Mohammed, his first name -- is among tens of thousands of Muslims trying to complete the annual rite on the cheap, according to officials and travel agents.

The unregistered pilgrims can save thousands of dollars by spurning formal channels, but they risk arrest and deportation if caught by security forces.

A Syrian man was arrested after a shooting near the US embassy in Beirut on Wednesday and a judicial official said the assailant carried out the attack "in support of Gaza".

The embassy in the capital's northern suburb of Awkar "was subjected to gunfire by a person holding Syrian nationality", the army said on social media platform X.

"Army personnel deployed in the area responded to the sources of fire, wounding the shooter," the statement said, adding that "he was arrested and transported to hospital".

In an unassuming house on the Tunisian island of Djerba, Said al-Barouni embarked on a mission to safeguard his Muslim community's little-known heritage, using technology and AI to save age-old religious manuscripts.

The 74-year-old librarian and member of the Islamic offshoot Ibadism took up the reins of his family's six-generation library in the 1960s and has been in a race against time to preserve whatever Ibadi manuscripts he can find.

Global warming has accelerated at an "unprecedented" pace as the window to limit rising temperatures within internationally-set targets closes, over 50 leading scientists warned in a study published on Wednesday.

Looking at decade averages, temperatures climbed 0.26 degrees Celsius from 2014 to 2023, said the study published in the journal Earth System Science Data.

In that same period, average global surface temperatures reached 1.19C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial benchmark for measuring a warming world.

The US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to advance a largely symbolic bill calling for sanctions on the International Criminal Court after its prosecutor applied for an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Hague-based court's prosecutor has said Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant should be arrested on charges relating to the war in Gaza, along with three leaders of militant group Hamas.

Mohammad Hammud, in his late 70s, was at home with his wife in a south Lebanon border village when Israeli bombing hit. This time, the attack was different.

"Fire broke out in front of the house... there was a strange smell... we had trouble breathing," he told AFP by telephone from his village of Hula.

"We thought it was a regular bombing but when the emergency responders arrived they told us it was phosphorus and took us to hospital," he said.

Some Gazans are now reduced to drinking sewage water and eating animal feed, the WHO's regional chief said Tuesday, pleading for increased aid access immediately to the besieged territory.

Hanan Balkhy, the World Health Organization's Eastern Mediterranean regional director, also warned that the war between Israel and Hamas had a knock-on impact on healthcare across the wider region.

And the impact on children will have severe lasting effects, the child health expert told AFP in an interview at the WHO headquarters in Geneva.

Plans to expand Israel's desert city of Dimona, known as the cradle of the national nuclear programme, are stoking fears among nearby Bedouin villagers for their traditional way of life.

When Hassan Hawashla looks out his window, he sees rows of identical modern apartment blocks, and construction cranes building more, as Dimona spreads into the surrounding Negev desert.

"Every day when I look at this city, it's getting closer and closer to us," said Hawashla, 40, who himself is among the construction labourers working in Dimona.

Shouting and screaming with glee and frustration, Gazan boys kicked footballs around with their bare feet. It could have been almost anywhere in the world, but this was a sandy soccer field surrounded by tents in war-torn Gaza.

In Khan Yunis, a southern city of the coastal Palestinian territory, dozens turn up for practice as often as they can on the improvised pitch set up on the beach area of Al-Mawasi.