Syrians in government-held areas were voting Monday in their fourth parliamentary election since civil war erupted in 2011, a poll expected to keep President Bashar al-Assad's ruling Baath party in power.

While voting was calm in most areas, a war monitor and a local media outlet reported protests against the election in southern Sweida province, the heartland of Syria's Druze minority, which has seen regular demonstrations for almost a year.

Israeli air and artillery fire pounded the Gaza Strip on Monday, more than nine months into the war between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants as peace hopes faded.

Fallout from the fighting again spread to the surrounding region. Two ships were attacked off Yemen, according to security agencies, while a war monitor said an Israeli strike near the Syria-Lebanon border killed a Western-sanctioned businessman who was close to Syria's president.

Hamas's armed wing said militants had fired a missile at two Israeli tanks in the Tal al-Hawa district of Gaza City, in the north.

Syrians in government-held areas were voting Monday in their fourth parliamentary election since civil war erupted in 2011, a poll expected to keep President Bashar al-Assad's ruling Baath party in power.

The Baath party -- in power since 1963 -- and its secular left-wing and Arab nationalist allies are running virtually unopposed, with independents the only alternative.

More than 1,500 people are standing for 250 seats in the largely rubber-stamp parliament, after some 7,400 candidates withdrew in recent days, according to Syria's Supreme Judicial Elections Committee.

The civil defence agency in Hamas-run Gaza said Sunday that 15 people were killed in a strike on a school sheltering war displaced where the Israeli military said it had targeted "terrorists".

The strike on the UN-run Abu Araban site in central Gaza's Nuseirat camp was the fifth on a school-turned-shelter in eight days.

The Abu Araban school was housing "thousands of displaced people," civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP, adding that most of the dead were women and children.

Eight Palestinian athletes taking part in the Paris Olympics will be symbols of "resistance" during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, a Palestinian minister said Sunday as the official delegation left the occupied West Bank.

This will be the eighth time Palestinian athletes have taken part in the Olympics since 1996, but Olympic committee head Jibril Rajoub said the athletes had never felt so much attention.

Israeli police shot dead a car driver who ran down four soldiers at a bus stop near a military base on Sunday, police and army spokesmen said.

Police called it a "suspected terrorist attack" and said the driver, a Palestinian from east Jerusalem, had been "neutralised" during the incident close to the Tzrifin military base near the central city of Lod.

A military statement said one officer and a soldier were "severely injured" in the incident and two others also hurt.

A Hamas official said Sunday that the Palestinian group was withdrawing from Gaza truce talks, as Israeli bombardments hit a school a day after a deadly strike targeting the militant commander Mohammed Deif.

Speaking after the strike on southern Gaza's Al-Mawasi, which the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said killed at least 92 people, a senior official from Iran-backed Hamas cited Israeli "massacres" as a reason for suspending negotiations.

A Syrian soldier was killed Sunday and three others wounded in Israeli strikes on several positions in and around Damascus, Syrian state media said.

The Israeli military, meanwhile, said it had targeted a Syrian military command centre as well as targets and infrastructure belonging to the Syrian army and air defence in response to two drones launched towards Israel from Syrian territory.

Comedian Ayman Nahas said he has kept a "low profile" since October 7, fearing reprisals as an Arab artist in Israel while the country wages war in the Gaza Strip.

He is one of many Arab artists in Israel or annexed east Jerusalem who describe facing increasing hostility and harassment, and fearing looming funding cuts or arrests.

"You never know where your place is and that is not the right atmosphere to perform," said Nahas, who is also the artistic director at the Arabic-language Sard theatre in Haifa, in Israel's north.

Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif has become a master at eluding Israeli attempts on his life and he may have made it seven out of seven when artillery and fighter jets pounded a suspected hideout on Saturday.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged hours after an attack in southern Gaza that there was "no certainty" that Deif and one of his deputies, Rafa Salama, had been killed.