Indonesian President Joko Widodo pressed US President Joe Biden during a visit to the White House on Monday to do more to end "atrocities" in Gaza and help bring about a ceasefire.
The Israel-Hamas war overshadowed the talks, which had been meant to showcase an upgrade in ties between Indonesia and the United States ahead of Biden's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.
Nations grappling with the plastic "suffocating" nature and leaching into food and the human body began fresh negotiations on Monday toward a UN treaty to tackle the growing problem.
Some 175 countries agreed last year to conclude by 2024 a binding agreement to combat the plastic pollution littering oceans, mountain tops, and even blood and breast milk.
Negotiators have met twice already but the week-long talks in Kenya are the first to consider the concrete details of the treaty, and tensions have emerged over what it should contain.
With tanks massed at the gates of Gaza's largest hospital, US President Joe Biden pressed Israeli allies to protect civilians, who on Tuesday were trapped inside with dwindling supplies of fuel and water.
After days of heavy air strikes around Gaza City's Al-Shifa hospital, witnesses said tanks and armoured vehicles were metres from the gate of the besieged facility, which has become a focal point of the five-week-old war.
Flags flew at half-mast at UN facilities across the globe Monday including at the body's New York headquarters, as staff stood in silent tribute to the more than 100 colleagues killed in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war.
The blue and white United Nations flag was lowered at 9:30 am local time at offices in Bangkok, Tokyo and Beijing, with other UN venues following suit.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres led UN personnel in observing a minute of silence at UN headquarters when the clock struck 9:30 am in New York.
Five weeks after the Hamas attacks, the families and friends of Israelis taken hostage by the militant group are doing everything to ward off public fatigue and keep attention on their plight.
Hadas Kalderon's daughter Sahar, 16, son Erez, 12, and ex-husband Ofer, 53, are among those believed to have been taken by Hamas to Gaza on October 7.
She has had to describe her nightmare "a hundred times", she said.
A drone from Lebanon appears on the other side of the hill from the Israeli soldiers. The sighting is reported by radio, but its buzz has already alerted the troops.
Two of the camouflaged soldiers on the ground train their M-16s skywards.
"This is how it is here. We go from 0 to 100 in a few seconds," says Kamal Saad, 33, who commands the Israeli army's 299th Battalion operating in the north.
Cross-border exchanges of fire have intensified since Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel, mostly between Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, and Israeli forces.
Stooping under the weight of his body armour but uncowed by the threat of violence, Rabbi Arik Ascherman guards an olive grove in the occupied West Bank, protecting Palestinian farmers from rising Israeli settler violence.
"There is no excuse, there is no explanation, no justification for what Hamas did" in its October 7 attacks on southern Israel, said the 64-year-old, a veteran activist with the Rabbis for Human Rights group.
In the Druze village of Hurfeish, an Arab minority community near Israel's border with Lebanon, mostly women remain after many men had left to join the front lines of war.
This community in Galilee, brightly adorned with Israeli and Druze flags, has been flush with patriotic fervour since Hamas militants from Gaza smashed through the militarised border with Israel, about 200 kilometres (125 miles) to the south.
The attack left around 1,200 dead on the Israeli side, mostly civilians killed on October 7, according to the latest official Israeli figures.
South African police fired stun grenades and water cannons in Cape Town on Sunday to quell clashes between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
A prayer for Israel and the Hamas hostages held in Gaza was to be held in the early afternoon in an affluent area of Cape Town on the Atlantic coast, a popular place for family walks on Sundays.
The United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon said gunfire from an unidentified source hit a member of its contingent early Sunday, adding that the peacekeeper was in a stable condition.
The statement from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) did not indicate whether the incident was linked to ongoing exchanges of fire on the Lebanese border, mainly between Hezbollah and Israel, since a Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 triggered war.
