A hard-hitting Iranian film about the country's women-led protests that has wowed Cannes was kept so secret that even its star didn't know who was making it for several months, she told the festival on Saturday.

"The Seed of the Sacred Fig" has blown away critics at the Cannes Film Festival with its powerful depiction of a family torn apart by the "Women, Life, Freedom" protests that erupted in Iran in 2022.

It is considered a frontrunner for an award at the closing ceremony later on Saturday.

Italy said Saturday it would resume funding for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), as Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa made a visit to Rome.

"Italy has decided to resume financing specific projects intended for assistance to Palestinian refugees but only after rigorous controls that guarantee that not even a penny risks ending up supporting terrorism," Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said.

Israeli warplanes and artillery pounded Rafah, after the government dismissed an order by the top UN court to halt its military offensive in the southern Gaza city.

At the same time, questions remained over the resumption of truce talks despite renewed international efforts aimed at securing a prisoner-hostage exchange and ceasefire in the war sparked by Palestinian militant group Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel.

An Israeli official said Saturday the government had an "intention" to restart stalled negotiations over the coming days.

Only a dozen pilgrims turned up Friday at this year's Jewish pilgrimage on Tunisia's island of Djerba amid heightened security concerns after a deadly attack last year and as the Israel-Hamas war rages in Gaza.

The pilgrimage to the Ghriba synagogue, Africa's oldest, usually draws thousands of pilgrims from Europe, Israel and beyond, attracting international and local tourists as well.

But on the first day of the pilgrimage event this year, only about a dozen worshippers were present -- almost none of them foreigners -- with a heavy police and National Guard presence.

The shouts ringing out from the makeshift baseball court on the ship's deck are a far cry from the desperation of a few days ago, when the players were plucked from the often fatal waters of the Mediterranean.

As the young Bangladeshi men scampered and leapt for the ball, some watched while others aboard the Ocean Viking migrant rescue ship drew with crayons or pushed pawns across wooden game boards.

In a cowshed in Gaza's Khan Yunis, zookeeper Fathi Ahmed Gomaa has created a temporary home for dozens of animals including lions and baboons, having fled with them from Israel's offensive in Rafah.

"We've moved all the animals we had, except for three big lions that remain (in Rafah)", he said.

"I ran out of time and couldn't move them."

Ahmed abandoned his zoo in Rafah when Israel ordered the evacuation of parts of the southern Gazan city.

A momentary shriek presages a bone-juddering blast, followed by a plume of thick black smoke. Refrigerator-sized holes mark where Hezbollah anti-tank missiles like this one have hit along Israel's northern border.

Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has been exchanging near-daily cross-border fire with the Israeli army since Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attack triggered war in Gaza.

The Iran-backed militants have launched thousands of rockets, mortar rounds, anti-tank missiles and attack drones at northern Israel.

Switzerland's foreign minister on Friday returned to her Iraqi counterpart three important Mesopotamian objects seized during a criminal procedure, the Swiss government said.

During a ceremony at the culture ministry in Bern, Elisabeth Baume-Schneider handed over a partial statue and two Mesopotamian reliefs to Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein.

The three works, which are 1,700 to 2,800 years old, are "of great significance" to Iraq, the ministry said in a statement.

They were confiscated during a criminal procedure in the Geneva canton last year, it said.

Kurdish authorities in northeast Syria said Friday that they had handed over a woman and three children to British representatives for repatriation, with a source saying they had been held in a camp for jihadists' relatives.

Five years after the Islamic State group was driven out of its last bastion in Syria, tens of thousands of the jihadists' family members, including from Western countries, remain in detention camps in the Kurdish-controlled northeast.

The annual Jewish pilgrimage on Tunisia's island of Djerba began Friday with low turnout amid heightened security concerns after a deadly attack last year and as the Israel-Hamas war rages in Gaza.

The three-day pilgrimage to the Ghriba synagogue, Africa's oldest, usually draws thousands of pilgrims from Europe, Israel and beyond. It also attracts a significant number of international and local tourists and non-observant visitors.