In a sun-baked village north of Morocco's capital Rabat, Mustapha Loubaoui and other itinerant workers wait idly by the roadside for farm work made scarce by a six-year drought.

Loubaoui, 40, rode his combine harvester for 280 kilometres (175 miles) hoping to pick up work in what previously had been the booming agricultural village of Dar Bel Amri.

His day-long journey was for nothing. Now Loubaoui fears he will end up like the roughly 159,000 Moroccan agricultural workers who, official figures say, have lost their jobs since early last year.

Muazzaz Abayat's parents barely recognised their son lying in a hospital bed after being freed from nine months in Israeli detention, with his weight halved from his usual heavyset build, hollowed cheeks and shaggy hair.

"I came back from the dead," the 37-year-old Palestinian, told AFP at a hospital in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.

Abayat, a butcher by trade, was arrested without explanation on October 26, just over two weeks after the unprecedented Hamas attack on southern Israel that sparked the Gaza war.

Al-Rimal was once one of Gaza City's most vibrant neighbourhoods, but the end of another Israeli assault left residents stumbling through the rubble on Friday looking for bodies and belongings.

Residents of Al-Rimal, which before the war was home to Palestinian government buildings and most of Gaza City's remaining shops and restaurants, said bodies had been left lying in the streets.

The Hamas-run territory's civil defence agency said scores of dead had also been found in nearby districts after Israeli troops ended a new operation against militants in parts of Gaza City.

A German labour court said Friday that Bundesliga football club Mainz had unfairly terminated the contract of winger Anwar El Ghazi after the player made comments about the war in Gaza on social media.

The court in the city of Mainz said in a statement it had ruled in favour of El Ghazi, who had brought a case against the club.

Mainz's decision to dismiss the former Dutch international last year "did not terminate the employment relationship" and the contact between the parties remained valid, the court said.

The civil defence agency in Hamas-run Gaza said Friday that about 60 bodies had been found in an initial search of two Gaza City districts where Israeli troops ended an offensive.

The bodies were found in the Tal al-Hawa and Al-Sinaa districts, the agency said. Israeli troops had pulled out after days of battles with Hamas militants, the agency and residents said. This was not immediately confirmed by Israel.

Civil defence and medical teams had "recovered approximately 60 martyrs since the moment the Israeli occupation army withdrew this morning," an agency statement said.

Hamas-run Gaza's civil defence agency said it found around 60 bodies after Israeli troops withdrew from parts of Gaza City on Friday, as heavy fighting gripped the Palestinian territory.

The grisly discovery came as international mediators pushed on with efforts to halt the war now raging into its 10th month.

US President Joe Biden said at a NATO summit in Washington on Thursday that despite problems, US diplomats and other mediators were making "progress" towards a ceasefire and stressed that "it's time to end this war".

Campaign posters have sprung up across Damascus as Syria prepares to hold a parliamentary election in government-held areas on Monday that is designed to renew the ruling Baath party's grip on power.

It will be the fourth election to Syria's largely rubber-stamp parliament since civil war erupted in 2011. As in the previous ones, President Bashar al-Assad's Baath party, in power since 1963, is expected to secure most of the 250 seats.

"Although there are new candidates... the old ones that we're used to seeing" are still running, said Fawaz Hanna, 56.

The amount of dust in the air eased slightly in 2023, the United Nations said Friday, warning that poor environmental management was fuelling sand and dust storms.

The UN's weather and climate agency called for greater vigilance in the face of climate change, as drier surface soil leads to more dust being carried in the wind.

President Joe Biden said Thursday that US mediators were making progress in reaching a Gaza ceasefire deal as he called for an end to the Israel-Hamas war.

Biden, in a high-stakes, nearly hour-long news conference aimed at repudiating doubters of his reelection bid, acknowledged concerns about Israeli actions despite his overall support for the US ally.

"There's a lot of things in retrospect I wish I had been able to convince the Israelis to do, but the bottom line is we have a chance now. It's time to end this war," he said after a NATO summit in Washington.

A leading South African judge said on Thursday that "hardly anything" will deter Israel's Gaza offensive, but Pretoria's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice remains vital to highlight the dire situation.

South Africa's case brought in December 2023 alleges that Israel's Gaza offensive, launched in retaliation for an unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel, breached the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. Israel has strongly denied the accusation.