Hundreds of billboards featuring evocative poems which have been installed around the Iranian capital are contributing to an increase in road accidents, police were cited on Monday as saying.

Tehran municipality has put up some 600 billboards displaying excerpts from the work of contemporary Iranian poets on overhead pedestrian bridges and flyovers across the city.

The neat calligraphy features the work of 104 poets and covers multiple topics including romance, religion and society.

Lebanon's caretaker prime minister said Monday he was working to ensure his country does not enter the Hamas-Israel war, even as Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging cross-border fire.

Najib Mikati said he feared an escalation, with the border skirmishes stoking concerns that Lebanon's powerful Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, a Hamas ally, could open a new front with Israel.

"I am doing my duty to prevent Lebanon from entering the war" raging further south, Mikati told AFP in an interview.

Shani Louk, a 23-year-old German-Israeli woman abducted by Hamas fighters when they stormed a music festival in the Israeli desert, is dead, Israel's foreign ministry said Monday.

"Our hearts are broken," the ministry wrote in a message on X, formerly Twitter, as it confirmed Louk's death.

"Shani, who was kidnapped from a music festival and tortured and paraded around Gaza by Hamas terrorists, experienced unfathomable horrors," it said.

"May her memory be a blessing."

Israel said Tuesday its forces battled Hamas inside Gaza overnight and struck 300 targets after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu categorically ruled out a ceasefire as a "surrender" to the Palestinian militant group.

"The soldiers killed terrorists and directed air forces to real-time strikes on targets and terror infrastructure," the army said in a statement.

In the fourth night of major ground operations inside the north of the Palestinian territory, it reported "several engagements" in which its forces came under anti-tank missile and machine gun fire.

Iranian authorities have arrested a prominent lawyer and human rights defender as she attended the funeral of a teenage girl who died after a disputed metro incident, her husband said Monday.

The arrest of 60-year-old Nasrin Sotoudeh took place Sunday in Tehran during the funeral of 17-year-old Armita Garawand, who died a day earlier after nearly a month in intensive care.

Sotoudeh, who was awarded the European Parliament's 2012 Sakharov prize for her human rights work, has been arrested several times in recent years.

World oil prices sank Monday as traders hoped a region-wide conflict could still be avoided and Israel said its forces killed dozens of Hamas militants in clashes in Gaza.

Equities rose in Europe and on Wall Street as the sliding oil market lifted hopes that the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England will opt for no-change when they announce their latest interest-rate decisions on Wednesday and Thursday respectively.

Crude futures pared Friday's near three percent gains as Israel's military continued air and ground operations in Gaza.

Some support an Israeli invasion of Gaza, others want a prisoner swap, but relatives of dozens seized by Hamas said Sunday they were united in demanding Israel's government end their nightmare.

More than three weeks after shock cross-border attacks on Israeli kibbutz communities, towns and army bases near the Gaza border, the fearful families feel they are only just starting to be taken seriously by the authorities.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday accused Ukraine and the West of instigating anti-Israel rioting at Dagestan's Makhachkala airport the previous day, an accusation that Washington has called absurd.

Security forces have detained over 80 people since the incident, which saw rioters in the Muslim-majority region take over the runway on Sunday evening in an attempt to encircle a plane that had flown in from Israel.

Israel must protect innocent Gaza residents by distinguishing between Hamas militants and civilians, the White House warned Sunday, as world leaders stepped up calls for desperately needed humanitarian aid to reach the war-torn Palestinian territory.

Israel has intensified its air and ground operations against Hamas in Gaza following a bloody attack by the Palestinian militant group more than three weeks ago that Israeli authorities say killed at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians.

A Reuters journalist killed in southern Lebanon two weeks ago and others wounded in the same incident were deliberately targeted, a Reporters Without Borders investigation released on Sunday said.

Video journalist Issam Abdallah died and six other journalists were wounded -- including two from AFP, one of them seriously -- in strikes the village of Alma al-Shaab in southern Lebanon on October 13.

"The initial findings of the investigation show that the reporters were not collateral victims of the shooting," the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said.