Shouting and screaming with glee and frustration, Gazan boys kicked footballs around with their bare feet. It could have been almost anywhere in the world, but this was a sandy soccer field surrounded by tents in war-torn Gaza.
In Khan Yunis, a southern city of the coastal Palestinian territory, dozens turn up for practice as often as they can on the improvised pitch set up on the beach area of Al-Mawasi.
Saudi Arabia said Tuesday pilgrims can expect average high temperatures of 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit) during the hajj, which last year saw thousands of cases of heat stress.
"The expected climate for hajj this year will witness an increase in average temperatures of one and a half to two degrees above normal in Mecca and Medina," national meteorology centre chief Ayman Ghulam told a press conference.
The forecast indicates "relative humidity 25 percent, rain rates close to zero, average maximum temperature 44 degrees", he said.
US President Joe Biden on Tuesday appeared to play down a suggestion he made in an interview with Time magazine that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dragging out the Gaza war for political reasons.
Speaking to Time last week, days before his announcement of an Israeli proposal for a Gaza ceasefire deal that Netanyahu greeted coolly, Biden was asked if he believed the Israeli was prolonging the conflict for his own political self-preservation.
"There is every reason for people to draw that conclusion," Biden replied in the interview, which was published Tuesday.
Palestinians displaced by the Gaza war are living in "appalling" conditions, with children sometimes going for a whole day without food and thousands sharing the same toilet, Oxfam warned on Tuesday.
Deadly Israeli bombardment and fighting has raged in the Gaza Strip's far-southern Rafah area near the Egyptian border in recent weeks, again displacing those who had fled there in search of safety.
More than one million people have fled Rafah for other areas, according to the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA.
Iraqi authorities have made several arrests over recent attacks on US-linked outlets, including among security force personnel, the interior ministry said on Tuesday.
Dozens of men attacked two restaurants in Baghdad on Monday including a KFC, security officials said, as calls grow to boycott US brands over Israel's war in Gaza.
They were the latest in a spate of attacks targeting Western-linked brands in Iraq that started last week and have so far caused damage but no casualties.
The Israeli ambassador to Japan has not yet been invited to Nagasaki's annual peace ceremony, said city officials who instead sent the embassy a letter calling for a Gaza ceasefire.
The city in southern Japan this week invited dozens of countries and territories to the August 9 event on the anniversary of the US nuclear attack in 1945 that killed 74,000 people.
But "as for Israel, the situation is changing day by day... so we have put sending an invitation letter on hold," mayor Shiro Suzuki told reporters on Monday.
Heavy fighting rocked Gaza on Tuesday after G7 and Arab powers urged both Israel and Hamas to agree to a truce and hostage release deal outlined by US President Joe Biden.
Mediator Qatar said it had yet to see statements from either side "that give us a lot of confidence", but the foreign ministry said Doha was "working with both sides on proposals on the table".
Washington said it would seek a UN Security Council resolution to back the three-phase roadmap which Biden presented last Friday as Israel's plan, even as the war has ground on.
Israeli authorities were on alert for new brush fires on Tuesday, after munitions fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah the previous evening ignited several blazes across northern Israel.
The Israel Fire and Rescue Service said dozens of firefighting teams worked through the night with teams from the Nature and Park Service, army, police and other agencies before the largest fires were brought under control in the morning, an AFP journalist reported.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office on Tuesday denied American media reports that he will address the US Congress on June 13, amid mounting pressure to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas.
Netanyahu's office told Israeli media the date of his speech to Congress had "not been finalised", but it would not be on June 13 because it interferes with a Jewish holiday.
The date had been reported by Punchbowl News and Politico.
Iran's acting foreign minister Ali Bagheri said Monday his government was engaged in negotiations with arch-foe the United States hosted by the Gulf sultanate of Oman.
Asked about the issue at a news conference during a visit to Beirut, Bagheri said "we have always continued out negotiations... and they have never stopped."
Washington and Tehran have not had diplomatic relations since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.
