After a career in the shadows, spent in Israeli prisons and the internal security apparatus of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar emerged as the leader of the Palestinian group after igniting a war that has engulfed the region.

Chief architect of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the deadliest in its history, Sinwar was killed during an operation in Gaza, Israel's military said on Thursday.

Hamas has yet to confirm his death.

Some 345,000 Gazans face "catastrophic" levels of hunger this winter due to falling aid deliveries, UN agencies said Thursday, warning of the persistent risk of famine across the Palestinian territory.

This is up from the 133,000 people currently categorised as experiencing "catastrophic food insecurity", according to a classification compiled by UN agencies and NGOs.

Lebanese data scientist and volunteer rescue worker Bachir Nakhal started a crowdfunding effort to buy new ambulances for south Lebanon months ago, fearing Israel's war in Gaza could spread to his country.

But weeks into Israel's war with Hezbollah, his worst fears came true when an ambulance he had helped purchase was bombed.

"We were trying to get the number of ambulances up to the bare minimum level," he told AFP.

The speaker of the French Senate -- the country's second most senior figure under the constitution -- said Thursday he was "astounded" by remarks attributed to Emmanuel Macron on Israel and accused the president of showing his "ignorance" of history.

Macron was quoted as saying in a cabinet meeting Tuesday that Israel "must not forget" it owed its existence to a United Nations resolution after its troops fired on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards chief Hossein Salami warned Thursday of further retaliation against Israel if it attacks Iranian targets, which Israel has vowed to do after Iran's missile attack on October 1.

"If you make a mistake and attack our targets, whether in the region or in Iran, we will strike you again painfully," Salami said at the funeral of a Guards general killed in an Israeli strike last month.

Israel announced on Thursday the killing of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the October 7 attack, calling his death a "heavy blow" to the Palestinian group it has been fighting for more than a year.

The Israeli military said that after a year-long hunt, troops had on Wednesday "eliminated Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Hamas terrorist organisation, in an operation in the southern Gaza Strip".

Hamas has not confirmed his death.

More than one billion people are living in acute poverty across the globe, a UN Development Program report said Thursday, with children accounting for over half of those affected.

The paper published with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) highlighted that poverty rates were three times higher in countries at war, as 2023 saw the most conflicts around the world since the Second World War.

The United States on Wednesday conducted multiple B-2 bomber strikes on weapons storage facilities in areas of Yemen controlled by the Iran-backed Huthi rebels, according to the US military and defense department.

The Huthis vowed to retaliate after their Al-Masirah television network reported some 15 strikes at dawn on Thursday local time targeting sites north and south of the capital Sanaa, as well as farther north in Saada governorate, a Huthi stronghold.

Inaction on the water crisis could put more than half of the world's food production at risk by 2050, experts warned in a major report published Thursday.

"Nearly 3 billion people and more than half of the world's food production are now in areas where total water storage is projected to decline," said the report by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW).

The report also warned the water crisis could lead to an eight percent drop in GDP on average for high-income countries by 2050 and as much as 15 percent for lower-income countries.

French President Emmanuel Macron has further strained tense relations with Israel with a comment referring to the creation of the Israeli state, a verbal jab that was rapidly denounced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as distorting history.

Macron has sought to take a more uncompromising stance on the conflicts in the Middle East after Israel launched an offensive against targets of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon, a former French protectorate.