Israel conducted fresh strikes on southern Gaza's overcrowded border town of Rafah on Friday, where more than a million displaced Palestinians have sought shelter, with key backer the United States warning of a looming "disaster".
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he has ordered troops to "prepare to operate" in Rafah, the last major town in the Gaza Strip Israeli ground troops have yet to enter.
OpenAI chief Sam Altman is seeking to raise trillions of dollars to reshape the global semiconductor industry, and has held talks with potential investors including the UAE government, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Altman is reportedly looking to resolve some of the biggest challenges faced by the rapidly-expanding artificial intelligence sector -- including a shortage of the expensive computer chips needed to power large-language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Israeli history teacher Meir Baruchin has paid a high price for denouncing the war in Gaza: he was sacked from his job and even locked up as a "high-risk detainee".
The school teacher triggered a firestorm after Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, by posting a photo of Palestinians killed by the Israeli army.
He has now been given permission to teach students again at the Yitzhak Shamir High School in Petah Tikva near Tel Aviv.
But the approval is only provisional and he has to do so remotely so as not to cause incidents.
Meta on Thursday said it had removed the Facebook and Instagram accounts of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for violating its content policy.
"We have removed these accounts for repeatedly violating our Dangerous Organizations & Individuals policy," a Meta spokesperson told AFP.
Though Meta did not mention the Israel-Hamas war, the company has been under pressure to ban the leader ever since the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.
After the attack, Khamenei supported the bloody rampage by Hamas, but denied any Iranian involvement.
Hundreds of thousands of people's lives are at risk in north and central Gaza because of a lack of food, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) warned on Thursday.
UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said the last time the agency was allowed to deliver supplies to the area was more than two weeks ago on January 23.
Other agencies providing humanitarian aid also reported blocks on getting relief into the Palestinian territory, which has been bombarded by Israel since Hamas's deadly attack on October 7.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday warned that his organization's Palestinian refugee agency cannot be replaced, even as it faces criticism after 12 staffers were implicated in Hamas's attack on Israel.
Several countries -- including the United States, Britain, Germany and Japan -- have suspended funding to the UNRWA agency, and Guterres has led crunch talks with donor countries to have payments reinstated.
Argentina's President Javier Milei on Thursday likened Hamas's attacks on southern Israel to the Holocaust, after touring a kibbutz targeted in the deadly October 7 raids.
Milei joined Israel's President Isaac Herzog on a visit to Nir Oz near the border with Gaza, where residents were killed or taken hostage by the Palestinian militant group.
They were accompanied by former hostage Ofelia Roitman, an elderly Argentine who moved to Israel in 1985, making her first visit back to the farming community since she was released.
About 30 rockets were fired into northern Israel from Lebanon late Thursday into early Friday, following an Israeli drone strike that seriously wounded a commander of Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the Israeli army said.
"We can confirm that around 30 rockets were fired from Lebanon toward the areas of Ein Zeitim and Dalton in the north of Israel," an army spokesperson told AFP, adding that initial reports suggested "no one was wounded" by the strikes.
Hundreds of thousands of people's lives are at risk in north and central Gaza because of a lack of food, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned on Thursday.
UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini said the last time the agency was allowed to deliver supplies to the area was more than two weeks ago on January 23.
Other agencies providing humanitarian aid also reported blocks on getting relief into the Palestinian territory, which has been bombarded by Israel since Hamas's deadly attack on October 7.
US President Joe Biden will host Jordan's King Abdullah II in Washington on Monday for talks on resolving the Israel-Hamas conflict, the White House said.
The meeting comes as the United States and regional powers try to broker a ceasefire in exchange for the release of hostages from Gaza, amid hopes of a longer-term solution.
The two leaders will "discuss the ongoing situation in Gaza and efforts to produce an enduring end to the crisis," White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday in a statement.
