Shops, schools and government offices shut in the occupied West Bank, annexed east Jerusalem and allied countries Monday as Palestinians staged a general strike protesting against Israel's relentless onslaught in Gaza.
The bloodiest ever war in the Gaza Strip has killed more than 18,200 Palestinians in the territory, mostly women and children, as well as 104 Israeli soldiers, according to the latest reported death tolls.
In a workshop in the war-torn and besieged Gaza Strip, Ibrahim Shouman is bringing old brass stoves back to life, giving hope to displaced people deprived of gas for cooking.
With a squeeze of pliers, a new wick, and a refill of homemade fuel, a flash of fire miraculously begins to crackle.
"People have gone back to the old times and are bringing their brass camping stoves for repair because there is no gas or fuel available," Shouman told an AFP journalist in Rafah in the south of Gaza, near the border with Egypt.
The children of imprisoned Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi said Monday they were "extremely worried" about her health after she undertook a hunger strike in a Tehran prison.
Mohammadi, who has campaigned against the compulsory wearing of the hijab and the death penalty in Iran, stopped eating on Sunday in parallel with Sunday's Nobel prize ceremony in Oslo, where she was represented by her 17-year-old twins, Ali and Kiana.
It is not known whether her hunger strike is continuing or if it was just for the day.
Aid trucks stalled at the Gaza border, hospitals treating missing limbs: UN Security Council envoys visiting Egypt on Monday encountered the fallout of the Israel-Hamas war, days after the United States vetoed a ceasefire resolution.
The informal one-day trip organised by the United Arab Emirates and Egypt came amid a spiralling humanitarian crisis in war-devastated Gaza.
Around a dozen ambassadors took part from countries including Russia and Britain.
Heavy urban battles raged Monday in the bloodiest-ever war in Gaza, with more than 18,200 Palestinians and 104 Israeli soldiers reported dead amid a spiralling humanitarian crisis.
The war was triggered by Hamas's October 7 attacks that killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel and saw dozens of hostages dragged back to Gaza.
It has warned the remaining 137 hostages won't survive unless Israel meets its demands and frees more Palestinian prisoners.
Israel bombed southern Gaza's main city on Monday after Hamas warned no Israeli hostages would leave the territory alive unless its demands for prisoner releases were met.
Hamas triggered the conflict when it carried out the deadliest-ever attack on Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people, according to Israeli figures, and taking about 240 hostages back to Gaza.
Israel has responded with a military offensive that has reduced much of Gaza to rubble and killed at least 17,997 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
The world for the first time on Wednesday approved a call to transition away from fossil fuels as UN negotiations in Dubai tackled the top culprit behind climate change, but at-risk countries said far more action was needed.
After 13 days of talks and several sleepless nights in a country built on oil wealth, the Emirati president of the COP28 summit quickly banged a gavel to signal consensus among 194 countries and the European Union.
Hundreds of makeshift tents stand in a desolate landscape at the foot of Gaza City's ruined Al-Shifa hospital.
At least 30,000 people have taken refuge in its grounds between piles of rubble and waste after Israeli forces raided the medical facility last month, an AFP correspondent reported from the hospital.
Its medical equipment was heavily damaged and is now virtually unusable.
Food is scarce, too, but Gazans still come in search of what little safety a hospital -- supposedly protected under international law -- can afford as the shelling rumbles on.
The United Nations has only been able to reach a fraction of the nearly 25 million people needing aid in war-devastated Sudan, the head of the UN's humanitarian response in the country says.
But assistance to even those four million could soon stop if the chronic lack of funding continues, Clementine Nkweta-Salami told AFP in an interview on Sunday.
The UN's humanitarian coordinator for Sudan said the situation is "catastrophic", eight months into a conflict between rival generals that has torn the country apart.
Aid workers have called it the "forgotten war".
Israel and Cyprus have foiled an Iranian plan to kill Israelis on the east Mediterranean island, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement on Sunday.
"The Cypriot security and law enforcement agencies, in cooperation with the Mossad (Israeli intelligence), thwarted an Iranian terrorist infrastructure that planned to carry out attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets in Cyprus," the statement said.
