An Israeli air strike hit a school in central Gaza on Wednesday, with the Hamas-run territory's civil defence agency reporting that 18 people were killed, including UN staffers, and the military saying it had targeted militants.

The Al-Jawni school in Nuseirat, already hit several times during the war, was struck again on Wednesday, killing 18 people, including two members of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), said Gaza's civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal.

Hamas's October 7 attack has spurred a literary output so extensive that nearly one year later, some Israeli bookstores have entire sections devoted to the country's deadliest day since independence.

The roughly 50 Hebrew-language titles surveyed by AFP include detailed, unflinching testimonies from survivors.

There are also offerings from other genres from comic strips to a book of poetry written by one of the victims and published posthumously.

Israeli strikes Wednesday killed eight Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry and Red Crescent said separately, with the Israeli military confirming air raids in two locations.

The military said in a statement that its forces were engaged in a "counter-terrorism operation" in the northern West Bank's Tubas area and later carried out a separate strike on Tulkarem, both targeted in major Israeli raids last month.

In Tubas, a witness told AFP that Israeli forces were "storming the city" and the nearby town of Tamun early on Wednesday.

Iran and Iraq on Wednesday signed more than a dozen agreements to deepen already strong ties as Masoud Pezeshkian visited Baghdad on his first foreign trip as president of the Islamic republic.

The three-day trip comes amid turmoil in the Middle East sparked by the war in Gaza, which has drawn in Iran-backed armed groups and complicated Iraq's relations with the United States.

Speaking at a press conference alongside Pezeshkian, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said both governments opposed any expansion of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

One year after a wall of water swept through eastern Libya's coastal city of Derna, killing thousands and causing devastation, reconstruction is under way but essential services are lacking, NGOs say.

On September 10, 2023, extreme rainfall from hurricane-strength Storm Daniel caused two dams to burst inland from Derna, which lies some 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) east of the capital Tripoli.

The flooding killed nearly 4,000 people, left thousands missing and displaced more than 40,000 others, according to the United Nations.

The European Union's top diplomat Josep Borrell warned on Tuesday that increased violence in the occupied West Bank since the Israel-Hamas war erupted meant it risked becoming "a new Gaza".

Violence in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967 and is separated from the Gaza Strip by Israeli territory, has flared alongside the war that began after Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.

Algeria's presidential candidates who lost out to incumbent Abdelmadjid Tebboune in Algeria's presidential election filed appeals to the Constitutional Court Tuesday, contesting the provisional result of the vote.

Abdelaali Hassani, who heads the moderate Islamist party the Movement of Society for Peace, was first to submit his appeal.

He said the day before he had "lost the battle but not the war" and denounced the results as a "fraud".

Top US officials on Tuesday urged Israel to make changes to its operations in the occupied West Bank after the military acknowledged its fire likely killed an American activist there.

US President Joe Biden said he thought the killing of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was an "accident", but both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin called it "unprovoked and unjustified".

After an initially measured response to Eygi's death on Friday, pending a fact-finding exercise, Blinken said the United States would raise it at senior levels with its key ally.

Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, convicted on appeal of rape and sexual coercion by a Geneva court, is a Swiss intellectual accused of masking violence and radicalism behind a mild facade.

Ramadan, 62, is the grandson of the founder of the Islamist movement the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and wrote his doctoral thesis on his ancestor.

He basked in the public spotlight in the 2000s as a professor at Britain's prestigious Oxford university, lecturing across Europe as well as Morocco, Qatar and Japan, drawing crowds of students wherever he went.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant offered his support for a hostage release agreement in the first phase of a Gaza truce deal, saying it would give Israel a "strategic opportunity" to address other security challenges.

Bringing the hostages home is "the right thing to do", Gallant told foreign journalists.

"Achieving an agreement is also a strategic opportunity that gives us a high chance to change the security situation on all fronts," he said.