After four years of drought, Iraqi farmer Mohammed Sami was about to abandon his father's parched land, but then a water-saving irrigation system revived his crops and his hopes.

He is among hundreds of farmers in the country battered by heatwaves, scarce rain and depleted rivers to benefit from new water management systems brought by the UN World Food Programme.

The systems use automated sprinklers and drip irrigation to ensure scarce water is used in the most efficient way and is not lost as run-off or evaporated under the blazing sun.

Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah movement on Sunday announced the death of two of its fighters in attacks by Israel, accusing the country of trying to expand its strikes.

The accusation came after security sources reported two Israeli air raids deep inside Lebanon, in the country's east.

Israel and Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group allied to Hamas, have been exchanging cross-border fire almost daily since the Gaza war between Israel and Hamas militants began last October.

Air and artillery strikes pounded targets in Gaza Sunday as UN chief Antonio Guterres called for a surge of aid into the besieged territory he said was stalked by "horror and starvation".

Other world leaders added their voices to that of Guterres in appealing for an immediate ceasefire and a halt to Israeli plans to send in troops against militants in Gaza's crowded southern city of Rafah.

Around the Gaza Strip's besieged largest hospital, Palestinians have witnessed constant bombardment, mass arrests, tanks and corpses littering the streets during a multi-day Israeli raid, with no end in sight.

Israeli forces battling Hamas militants launched the operation in and around Gaza City's Al-Shifa hospital on Monday, saying senior operatives were based at the sprawling compound.

Since then, according to the military, about 150 Palestinian militants have been killed and hundreds more have been arrested or questioned.

Muslims worshippers flocked to Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound for the second Friday prayer of Ramadan under the heavy presence of Israeli police, a sign of lurking tensions in the holy city.

"We feel lucky to be at Al-Aqsa while hundreds of thousands are deprived of access to it," said Mustafa al-Sheikh, a 62-year-old Palestinian who travelled with his wife from Anata, a town near Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.

President Joe Biden will welcome Iraq's prime minister on April 15 for talks on the US troop presence, the White House announced Friday, as tensions subside following US clashes with pro-Iran militias.

It will mark the first trip to Washington by Prime Minister Mohamed Shia al-Sudani, who took office in October 2022.

Sudani in the past has called for an exit of US forces, redeployed nearly 10 years ago as part of a campaign to defeat the Islamic State extremist group, better known as ISIS, which had seized vast swathes of Iraq and Syria.

In a small hotel near the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, where she received radiation therapy for breast cancer, Palestinian Rim Abu Obeida waits anxiously.

She is among a group of Palestinian patients living in limbo while a top Israeli court weighs whether they can be sent back to war-torn Gaza now that their treatment is completed.

Like dozens of Gazans before the Israel-Hamas war erupted, she was granted permission to leave the territory for care because hospitals in the Gaza Strip did not have the necessary equipment.

Russia and China on Friday vetoed a US-led draft resolution at the Security Council on a ceasefire in Gaza, joining Arab countries in saying it did not pressure Israel, with Moscow accusing Washington of a "hypocritical spectacle."

The United States, Israel's main ally which has vetoed previous ceasefire calls, put forward the resolution in which the Security Council would have supported "the imperative of an immediate and sustained ceasefire" and for the first time condemned the October 7 attack by Hamas.

A flattened patch of earth is all that remains of where the graves once stood –- evidence, Iran's Bahais say, that their community is subjected to persecution even in death.

Beneath the ground in the Khavaran cemetery in the southeastern outskirts of Tehran lie the remains of at least 30 and potentially up to 45 recently-deceased Bahais, according to the Bahai International Community (BIC).

The Israeli government announced Friday it was confiscating 800 hectares of land in the occupied West Bank, which activists called the largest such seizure in decades.

An area of about 1,980 acres in the northern Jordan Valley has been declared "state land", said far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has vowed to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which are regarded as illegal under international law.