In Baqa al-Gharbiya, an hour's drive from Haifa, city folk have temporarily traded pens for boots to aid farmers in Israel facing a labour shortage exacerbated by the Gaza war.

Whether teachers or lawyers, Arab or Jew, they have come together during their leisure time to lend a helping hand to Arab-Israeli farmers like Marwan Abu Yassin for the harvest.

Arabs with citizenship account for around 20 percent of Israel's population, descendants of Palestinians who remained after mass expulsions at the time of Israel's founding in 1948.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Saturday to keep up the military pressure on Hamas, despite anguished appeals from relatives of hostages held in Gaza for a return to negotiations after friendly fire killed three captives.

The Israeli army revealed earlier that the three hostages were carrying a white flag and cried for help in Hebrew, when they were mistakenly fired on by Israeli troops.

Since the eruption of the Israel-Hamas war, New York's Columbia University has been gripped by divisions over the conflict and rancor over where free speech ends and hatred begins.

Noisy campus protests in Manhattan's Morningside Heights have become regular events, with hundreds of students, some wearing keffiyeh headscarves and flying the distinctive Palestinian colors, calling for an end to the fighting in Gaza.

Some 430 Americans of Yazidi background and Nobel laureate Nadia Murad accused French conglomerate Lafarge of supporting brutal attacks on the population through a conspiracy with the Islamic State, according to a complaint reviewed Friday by AFP.

The civil suit, filed in a New York court by attorneys that include human rights lawyer Amal Clooney references a $778 million US Department of Justice fine and guilty criminal plea in October 2022 by Lafarge, which was acquired by Swiss company Holcim in 2015.

While the UN's COP28 climate summit marked a pivot moment, when the world pledged to say "goodbye" to fossil fuels, International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol told AFP on Friday, it needs to now urgently boost finance for the energy transition in developing countries.

Birol welcomed the landmark agreement struck at the negotiations in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, under which nearly 200 countries agreed that the world should be "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems".

Israel has reportedly started to test a plan to flood Hamas's sprawling tunnel network, but experts say it is a dangerous option that poses huge risks to Gaza's besieged civilians.

The military is determined to destroy the tunnels after Hamas's October 7 attack in southern Israel, and army chief Herzi Halevi has suggested pumping water into them is "a good idea".

AFP takes a look at Hamas's tunnel network and Israel's bid to destroy it.

- 'Gaza metro' -

Multiple rockets were intercepted over central Jerusalem on Friday, AFP journalists reported.

Staff saw two explosions and heard three blasts, as sirens warning of incoming fire blared in the city for the first time since October 30, according to the Israeli military.

Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said it had fired rockets towards Jerusalem "as a response to the Zionist massacres of civilians".

Paramedics rushed to the scene after the alarm was raised in Jerusalem and nearby Beit Shemesh, the Magen David Adom emergency medical services said.

Love songs of Egyptian diva Umm Kalthoum boom across the Tel Aviv theatre where Arabs and Jews seek solace from the deadly Hamas-Israel war raging only miles away.

"On stage three Jews and three Arabs deliver their lines in Hebrew and sing in Arabic," said play director Igal Ezraty.

"It is meant to show that Arabic is not just the language of Hamas," whose militants launched a devastating attack on southern Israel in October triggering massive Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

A more precise picture of Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel has emerged from social security data, confirming the unprecedented scale of the violence but also challenging some initial testimonies.

The final death toll from the attack is now thought to be 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving a total of 1,139.

This excludes five people, among them four Israelis, still listed as missing by the prime minister's office.

Two of the world's largest shipping firms, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, said Friday they were suspending passage through a Red Sea strait vital for global commerce, after Yemeni rebel attacks in the area.

The Iran-backed Huthis, who control much of Yemen but are not recognised internationally, say they're targeting shipping to pressure Israel during its two-month-old war with Palestinian Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.

The maritime tensions have added to fears that the Gaza conflict could spread.