The United States and Britain announced widespread sanctions against Iran's military drone program on Thursday, in response to its weekend attack against Israel.

"Today, we are holding Iran accountable -- imposing new sanctions and export controls," US President Joe Biden said in a statement.

Tehran launched its first-ever direct military attack on Israel late Saturday in retaliation for an April 1 air strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus -- widely blamed on Israel -- that killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including two generals.

Dubai's airport, one of the world's busiest, witnessed major disruption for the third day in a row on Thursday after the heaviest rains on record drenched the desert United Arab Emirates.

Emirates, Dubai's state-owned flagship airline, and sister carrier flydubai resumed check-ins after telling passengers to stay away on Wednesday, when thousands of stranded passengers clogged the airport.

Some 1,244 flights were cancelled and 41 diverted on Tuesday and Wednesday, after torrential rains flooded the Middle East financial centre including its runways and highways.

His writing anticipated a Hamas attack on Israeli kibbutzim and an Iranian strike from the skies, but former Mossad spy turned thriller author Mishka Ben-David is now concerned about what lies ahead.

Since the October 7 Hamas attack, one of 72-year-old Ben-David's bestsellers has taken on an eerily prophetic tone.

Published in 2017, "The Shark" describes a deadly conflict that starts with a Hamas militant raid on kibbutzim near the Gaza border and culminates in a devastating Israeli attack on Iran in retaliation.

More than six months of Israel's military offensive in Gaza has turned the Palestinian territory into a "humanitarian hellscape", UN chief Antonio Guterres said Thursday, also warning that one wrong move could see the Middle East devolve into a wider war.

World powers have been nervously watching for Israel's vowed response to an unprecedented Iranian assault over the weekend, with fears that tit-for-tat attacks could push the region towards broader conflict.

"The Middle East is on a precipice," Guterres said.

Hundreds of Gazans found rare respite at the beach this week from more than six months of traumatising Israeli bombardments in the Palestinian territory.

After temperatures suddenly soared, children paddled in the sea and their friends played ball games on the sand around Deir el-Balah in the centre of the coastal strip -- but the war was never far away.

Deir al-Balah city became a focus of fighting in Gaza between Israeli forces and Hamas militants. Israeli bombardments have left children dead and wounded.

The abrupt resignation of the United Nations special envoy for Libya, Abdoulaye Bathily, is the latest sign of the failure of reconciliation efforts in the war-torn North African country, analysts told AFP.

The Senegalese diplomat, who on Tuesday tendered his resignation after only 18 months at the helm of the UN support mission UNSMIL, has repeatedly accused rival leaders of perpetuating divisions to serve their own interests.

Leaders of Columbia University defended the prestigious New York school's efforts to combat anti-Semitism on campus at a fiery congressional hearing on Wednesday.

The Columbia administrators were the latest school leaders hauled before Congress for questioning about protests fueled by the Israel-Hamas conflict roiling US college campuses.

University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill resigned in December in the wake of her responses to a congressional committee and Harvard University's Claudine Gay stepped down in January.

The Republican leader of the US House of Representatives on Wednesday announced a weekend vote on massive new military aid including some $61 billion in long-delayed support for Ukraine, as well as billions for Israel and Taiwan.

The vote -- set for Saturday -- could finally get much-needed help to outgunned Ukrainian forces as they battle Russian invaders, and President Joe Biden swiftly called for Congress to pass the package.

Dubai's giant highways were clogged by flooding and its major airport was in chaos as the Middle East financial centre remained gridlocked on Wednesday, a day after the heaviest rains on record.

Tailbacks snaked along waterlogged, six-lane expressways after up to 259.5 millimetres (10.2 inches) of rain, the most since records began 75 years ago, fell on the desert United Arab Emirates on Tuesday.

At least one person was killed, a 70-year-old man who was swept away in his car in Ras Al-Khaimah, one of the oil-rich country's seven emirates, police said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday he would host a leader of Palestinian militant group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in Turkey this weekend.

"The leader of the Palestinian cause will be my guest this weekend," Erdogan, an outspoken critic of Israel, told lawmakers.

While Erdogan did not say where he would meet the Hamas political leader, a Turkish official said that they would hold talks on Saturday at the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul.