An Israeli group campaigning for the release of hostages described the deaths of three members of the Bibas family as "heart-shattering" Wednesday as Hamas prepared to hand over their bodies.

"We received the heart-shattering news that Shiri Bibas, her children Ariel and Kfir, and Oded Lifshitz are no longer with us," the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement.

Yarden Bibas, the boys' father and Shiri's husband, was abducted separately on October 7, 2023 and was released from the Gaza Strip in a previous hostage-prisoner exchange on February 1.

World number one Aryna Sabalenka slumped to a 6-3, 6-2 loss against Denmark's Clara Tauson in the last 16 of the Dubai Championships on Wednesday, as Jasmine Paolini's title defence came to a painful end.

Sabalenka, who beat the 38th-ranked Tauson on her way to last month's Australian Open final, suffered a second straight premature exit after losing in her opening match in Qatar a week ago.

The haunting image of Shiri Bibas clutching her sons on October 7 was once again splashed across the front pages of Israeli newspapers Wednesday, as a collective sense of anguish set in after Hamas said it would return their bodies.

Footage of their abduction, filmed and broadcast by Hamas militants during their unprecedented 2023 attack on Israel, showed the 34-year-old mother and her sons Ariel, then four, and Kfir, just nine months old, being seized from their home near the Gaza border.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday dismissed a proposal by the United States to displace Palestinians from the war-devastated Gaza Strip, saying it "will go nowhere".

Khamenei made the remarks during a meeting in Tehran with Ziyad al-Nakhalah, leader of the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad.

"The idiotic American plans or some other plans regarding Gaza and Palestine will go nowhere," Khamenei said.

A British couple charged with spying in Iran during what they called a "slightly bonkers" round-the-world motorbike trip said they had ignored warnings not to travel to the country.

Husband and wife Craig and Lindsay Foreman were arrested in the southeast of Iran earlier this year and on Tuesday Iranian authorities said they had been charged with espionage.

Judiciary spokesman Asghar Jahangir said the pair had entered Iran "posing as tourists" and gathered information before their arrest in Kerman province.

Ali Qashmar walked into his south Lebanon hometown on the Israeli border Tuesday to find bulldozed fields and piles of rubble where there used to be neighbourhoods brimming with life.

"We came back to breathe the air of our lands and village, and we found our homes destroyed," said Qashmar, 74, from Odaisseh.

Qashmar, his children and their families fled in October 2023, after Hezbollah initiated cross-border hostilities with Israel over the war in the Gaza Strip.

More than a year later, the town "seemed totally abandoned, empty", he said.

US President Donald Trump has effectively blamed Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky for Russia's invasion, as French President Emmanuel Macron prepares for another round of talks with EU and non-European partners on Wednesday.

Zelensky previously criticised the US-Russia talks for excluding Kyiv, saying efforts to end the war must be "fair and involve European countries.

The Ukrainian leader's comments appeared to incense Trump, who launched a series of verbal attacks on Zelensky.

The French judiciary is investigating the 2012 deaths of reporters in Syria as a possible crime against humanity, anti-terror prosecutors told AFP on Tuesday.

Prominent US journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed by an explosion in the east of the war-torn country in what a US court later ruled was an "unconscionable" attack that targeted journalists on the orders of the Syrian government.

Hamas and Israel announced a deal Tuesday for the release of six living hostages from Gaza and the return of four captives' bodies -- including, the militants said, the remains of two young boys seen as national symbols back home.

The family of hostages Shiri Bibas and her sons Ariel and Kfir, the last remaining Israeli children held in Gaza, said they were "in turmoil" at the news, noting they had still received no "official confirmation" of their loved ones' deaths.

Formal, tense and laced with distrust, the highly anticipated Saudi-hosted talks between the United States and Russia on Tuesday carried all the hallmarks of a major diplomatic showdown.

The rare encounter marked a dramatic shift in US-Russia relations, following last week's phone call between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

The setting itself was striking.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, hosted the meeting at Diriyah Palace, where the kingdom rolled out the red carpet.