A UN expert who determined that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza on Wednesday said that she had faced threats over her work but insisted it only made her more determined to push ahead.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories, said this week there were reasonable grounds to believe Israel was committing "genocide" against Palestinians in Gaza.

Even before 18 people were killed when airdrops of aid into Gaza went disastrously wrong on Monday, many had questioned the sense in using planes when food can be delivered far more rapidly by road.

With only a trickle of aid getting into the starving north and the United Nations warning of "imminent famine" as it accuses Israel of blocking deliveries, foreign governments have turned to airdrops as "a way to show that they're doing something", said Shira Efron of the Israel Policy Forum.

Israeli forces on Wednesday killed three people in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, the Palestinian health ministry said, in a pre-dawn raid the military said targeted militants.

Residents told AFP that Israeli forces entered Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp just after midnight (2200 GMT on Tuesday) and raided several houses.

The area in the northern West Bank is a stronghold of Palestinian armed groups and the frequent target of Israeli military incursions.

Pope Francis offered his solidarity Wednesday to Catholics in Israel and the Palestinian territories ahead of Easter, after meeting Jewish and Muslim bereaved fathers campaigning for peace.

"You are not alone," the 87-year-old pontiff wrote in a letter ahead of the holiest weekend in the Christian calendar, when believers mark the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as the Hamas-Israel war continues to rage.

The children of Gaza have little to eat, have had to flee their homes and have survived nearly six months of terrifying Israeli bombardment.

But for a few precious minutes children in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the centre of the Gaza Strip laughed and yelped with joy.

Clowns and acrobats performed for them in the courtyard of a school where their displaced families have been sheltering from the bombing.

The unrelenting war has taken a terrible toll on Gaza's children.

Israeli forces pounded besieged Gaza on Wednesday and fought Hamas around several hospitals, despite a UN Security Council demand for a ceasefire.

Talks in Qatar towards a truce and hostage release deal involving US and Egyptian mediators have brought no result so far, with Israel and the Palestinian militant group blaming each other.

Tensions have risen between Israel and its top ally the United States over dire food shortages in Gaza and the soaring civilian death toll in the war sparked by Hamas's attack on October 7.

The southern Gaza Strip came under intense Israeli bombardment overnight, despite international pressure for an immediate ceasefire in the Palestinian territory where famine is looming.

Besieged Gaza is in desperate need of aid and the United States said it would continue airdrops, despite pleas from Hamas to stop the practice after the Islamist group said 18 people had died trying to reach food packages.

Nineteen years after assuming the presidency, Mahmud Abbas has timidly begun reforming the Palestinian Authority under US pressure, though diplomats were unconvinced a revamped administration was ready for a post-Gaza war future.

Abbas, 88, is dogged by low popularity among Palestinians and Israel's decades-old occupation of the West Bank where his government is based.

Israeli scientist Ellen Graber has spent years researching ways to save chocolate crops from climate change. But with the government slashing spending to fund the war in Gaza, her project is one of hundreds now hanging in the balance.

Graber's research had already been hit by the war -- she had to abandon her cacao plants when the area where they were grown was evacuated after the October 7 Hamas attack.

They survived weeks of drought-like conditions in a greenhouse.

But the state-funded Volcani Institute where she works is now facing huge budget cuts.

Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah movement on Wednesday announced the deaths of eight of its members after a day of cross-border fire with Israel that left at least 16 people dead.

Hezbollah said it had fired a barrage of rockets into northern Israel after its neighbour carried out a deadly strike on southern Lebanon.

One Israeli civilian was killed by the rocket fire.