US Secretary of State Antony Blinken next week pays his first official visits to Brazil and Argentina, the State Department said Friday, as he looks for common ground with the Latin American powers' independent-minded leaders.

Blinken will hold talks with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brasilia and President Javier Milei in Buenos Aires and also take part in a Group of 20 meeting of foreign ministers in Rio de Janeiro where he could have rare in-person interaction with his Russian counterpart.

On a clear day, the view south from Safed, high in the mountains of northern Israel, stretches uninterrupted across orange groves and orchards to the Sea of Galilee.

But all eyes in the historic city have been trained more recently on the jagged hills just a few kilometres (miles) away to the north -- and the border with Lebanon.

On Wednesday, an Israeli soldier was killed in a rocket strike in Safed, prompting retaliatory air strikes inside Lebanon that left at least 15 dead, including 10 civilians.

Egypt is constructing a walled camp in the Sinai Peninsula to receive displaced Palestinian civilians from the Gaza Strip, a US media report and an Egyptian human rights monitor said on Friday.

But Israel, which is waging a four-month-old war against Hamas militants in the territory, said it had no plans to move civilians there, as it prepares an offensive in Rafah, in Gaza's far south.

The Wall Street Journal said an eight-square-mile (21-square-kilometre) "walled enclosure" was under construction on the Egyptian side of the border.

A gunman killed two people Friday at a bus stop in southern Israel, authorities said, prompting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to warn the entire country was a frontline in the war.

Four others were wounded in the shooting near the southern town of Kiryat Malakhi, Israeli police said.

Two people who had been brought to the Kaplan Medical Center had been declared dead, a spokeswoman for the facility told AFP.

Two Iranian directors said they have been barred from travelling to the Berlin film festival for their new movie's premiere Friday for breaking one of their country's biggest taboos: showing a woman pursuing a "normal life".

Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha told AFP from Tehran that they knew they were playing with fire with "My Favourite Cake", one of 20 films vying for the Golden Bear top prize.

Nevertheless the crackdown came as a shock last autumn.

Israeli settler Ely Federman probably doesn't know it yet, but he is under international sanction.

While he is at war for Israel in Gaza, Britain has frozen his assets in the United Kingdom as part of a rare move targeting violent Israeli settlers.

On Monday Britain announced the sanctions, which include travel and visa bans, against Federman and three other "extremist Israeli settlers" accused of human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Israeli strikes on targets in south Lebanon killed five fighters from Hezbollah and the allied Amal movement, the groups said on Friday, adding to an uptick in violence causing international alarm.

Lebanon's state-run National News Agency (NNA) said Israeli warplanes hit five villages in southern Lebanon overnight Thursday-Friday.

A strike on one house in Al-Qantara village killed three members of the Shiite Islam Amal movement led by parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri, the movement said.

There was growing concern Friday over a key Gaza hospital a day after a raid by the Israeli army, with the Hamas-run territory's health ministry saying several patients had died there due to a lack of oxygen.

The ministry said power was cut off and the generators stopped after the raid at the Nasser Hospital in the main southern city of Khan Yunis, leading to the deaths of five patients.

In recent days, intense fighting has raged around the hospital -- one of the Palestinian territory's last remaining major medical facilities that are still operational.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro lashed out at his Argentine counterpart Thursday, three days after the United States completed the seizure of a Venezuelan plane held in Buenos Aires since June 2022.

"They stole our plane... Milei the bandit stole the plane from Venezuela. Javier Milei, the hero of the extreme right," Maduro said in a televised statement about the Argentine president.

"He acts crazy or he is crazy or both at the same time," he added.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said patients and medics were enduring "dire and frightening conditions" at a major hospital raided by Israeli soldiers on Thursday.

Hundreds of medics and patients remain inside the Nasser Hospital in the main southern city of Khan Yunis after thousands of displaced civilians who had sought refuge in its grounds were forced to leave by Israeli troops.

"Nasser medical complex is witnessing a catastrophic and alarming situation, as a result of the lack of medical resources," the health ministry said.