Argentina's President Javier Milei on Thursday likened Hamas's attacks on southern Israel to the Holocaust, after touring a kibbutz targeted in the 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 Argentinian national who moved to Israel in 1985, making her first visit back to the farming community since she was released.

Fakhria al-Ali depends on the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees for her breast cancer treatment in Lebanon, but after key countries suspended their financing, she fears she has been handed a death sentence.

"My life is a nightmare," said the unemployed 50-year-old, who lives in the impoverished Beddawi Palestinian refugee camp in north Lebanon.

"Without UNRWA I would die," she added, referring to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

Aid groups working in Yemen are warning of rising shipping costs and delivery delays due to the Red Sea attacks by Huthi rebels which threaten to aggravate one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

After nine years of conflict, more than half of Yemen's population requires humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations, with severe funding shortages hampering the response.

In Israel's biblical city of Nazareth, the basilica is empty, restaurants and shops that usually thrive on Christian pilgrims are closed, and many hotels have been shut for months.

The Gaza war that began after the Hamas attack of October 7 has plunged the country's tourism industry into a fresh crisis, just as it had started to recover from the Covid pandemic.

"We felt that the influx of tourists was starting to be good at the end of September, the beginning of October," said Marwa Taha Abu Rani, manager of the Fauzi Azar hostel in the Old City.

A German navy frigate set sail for the Red Sea on Thursday with the aim of protecting commercial ships from attacks by Yemeni rebels, as part of a planned European Union mission.

The deployment marked "the most serious engagement of a unit of the German navy in many decades," navy chief Jan Christian Kaack told reporters in Berlin.

Yemen's Iran-backed Huthi rebels have launched a series of attacks on ships crossing the Red Sea since November, saying their campaign was in solidarity with Palestinians in the war between Israel and Hamas.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday sought to advance a deal to free Gaza hostages in talks with Israeli moderates as he closed a Middle East tour without securing a pause in fighting.

US officials had tempered expectations that Blinken would achieve a breakthrough during his latest visit to the region since the October 7 attack on Israel, and few expected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree immediately to a Qatari-mediated offer.

The United States warned Israel Thursday that it risks "disaster" if it sends troops into Gaza's far-southern city of Rafah, where more than one million Palestinians have sought refuge.

The warning came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered troops to "prepare to operate" in Rafah, the last major town in the Gaza Strip Israeli ground troops have yet to enter.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday discussed ways to secure the release of Gaza hostages with moderates in the Israeli war cabinet a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Hamas demands.

Blinken met in Tel Aviv with Benny Gantz and Gabi Eisenkot, two former military chiefs who joined Netanyahu's war cabinet after the October 7 attack in Israel by Hamas fighters.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered troops to prepare to enter the overcrowded Gazan city of Rafah, even as a new round of talks aimed at securing a truce with Hamas were set to open Thursday in Cairo.

Netanyahu announced the order after rejecting Hamas's response to a ceasefire proposal at the centre of intense recent diplomatic efforts, though visiting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted on Wednesday that he still saw "space for agreement to be reached".

Earth has endured 12 consecutive months of temperatures 1.5C hotter than the pre-industrial era for the first time on record, Europe's climate monitor said Thursday, in what scientists called a "warning to humanity".

Storms, drought and fire have lashed the planet as climate change -- supercharged by the naturally-occurring El Nino weather phenomenon -- stoked record warming in 2023, making it likely the hottest in 100,000 years.