The Israeli army said Saturday troops had killed 10 militants in an ongoing raid around Nur Shams, a refugee camp in the north of the occupied West Bank.

AFP journalists heard gunshots and saw houses hit by blasts as Israeli drones flew overhead and armoured vehicles moved through the camp.

Since early last year, violence has flared in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967. It has escalated further since war broke out in Gaza on October 7.

Gaza's civil defence agency said Saturday an overnight Israeli strike killed nine members of a Palestinian family, including six children, in southern city Rafah.

Five children aged one to seven and a 16-year-old girl were among the dead, along with two women and a man, according to the city's Al Najjar hospital.

"Nine martyrs, including six children, were pulled out from the rubble after Israeli air forces struck a house of the Radwan family in Tal al-Sultan in Rafah," Gaza Civil Defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said in a statement.

Iran and Israel appeared to step back from the brink of broader conflict as lawmakers in the United States approved new Israeli military aid on Saturday despite growing criticism of its ally's war in Gaza.

Iran downplayed Israel's reported retaliation for its unprecedented drone and missile attack, tamping down fears that escalating attacks between the arch enemies could tip over into a broader war in the Middle East.

No one is around to harvest the fruits weighing down the loquat branches of Kfar Aza. No one except Shar Shnurman, the first survivor of the October 7 attack to have returned to this Israeli kibbutz.

"The entire kibbutz is my garden now," Shnurman said as he pointed to the lush vegetation peppered by the stark colour of citrus and loquat.

Since he and his wife Ayelet Khon returned in December to their community decimated by Hamas militants, they've strived to "live a normal life in an abnormal place".

The US House of Representatives on Saturday approved long-delayed military aid to Ukraine in a rare show of bipartisan unity, while also bolstering Israel and Taiwan defenses and threatening to ban Chinese-owned TikTok.

The four bills in the $95 billion package were overwhelmingly approved in quick succession, though they leave the future of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in some doubt as he seeks to fend off angry far-right detractors.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Palestinians to unite amid Israel's war in Gaza following hours-long talks with Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Istanbul on Saturday, his office said.

Erdogan has failed to establish a foothold as a mediator in the Gaza conflict that has roiled the region, with the Hamas-run Palestinian territory bracing for a new Israeli offensive and a reported Israeli attack on Iran.

One person was killed and eight wounded in an overnight explosion at an Iraqi military base housing a coalition of pro-Iranian armed groups, officials said Saturday.

The full details remain unclear hours after the blast hit the Kalsu military base in Babylon province south of Baghdad, where regular army, police and members of Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces, or Hashed al-Shaabi, are stationed.

It comes days after Iran launched an unprecedented assault on Israel which reportedly responded with a drone strike on the Islamic republic, amid tensions fuelled by the Gaza war.

After years of high-level US pressure on its ally to show restraint, Israel's purported attack on Iran takes the region and Western-led diplomacy into uncharted territory.

Iran and Israel have long waged a shadow war, marked by assassinations of Tehran's nuclear scientists and attacks on Israel by the clerical state's allies in the Arab world such as Lebanon's Hezbollah, but the United States has put a top priority on preventing a wide-scale war.

Palestinian officials said Friday Israeli troops killed a teenager and an adult in the occupied West Bank, while the Israeli army said it killed a "number of terrorists" in a raid.

Since early last year violence has flared across the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967. It has further escalated since Israel's war with Hamas broke out on October 7.

Qais Fathi Nasrallah, 16, was killed by Israeli troops in Tulkarem refugee camp in the northern West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah said.

An international humanitarian relief effort in the form of a Freedom Flotilla Coalition was getting ready Friday to leave the western Turkish port of Tuzla and bring much-needed relief to residents of war-torn Gaza.

At least three vessels carrying some 5,000 tons of food, drinking water and medical aid were awaiting the green light from Turkish authorities to set sail from the port on the Sea of Marmara, south of Istanbul, organisers said.