Marching in Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 was the first time AnnEliza Canning-Skinner "experienced what solidarity is," she says.

Fast-forward three years and the 28-year-old has been a regular on the streets of New York, marching in support of Palestinians as Israel's bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip hits the one month-mark.

Israel launched the offensive, which the UN warns is creating a humanitarian "catastrophe," after brutal Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7.

California police briefly detained a pro-Palestinian protester over the death of a Jewish man following a confrontation between two rival rallies, but no arrest has been made, officials said Tuesday.

Ventura County sheriff James Fryhoff said Paul Kessler's death from a head injury after falling to the ground "is being investigated as a homicide," and investigators have not yet ruled out the possibility of a hate crime.

Families of Israelis taken hostage by Hamas went to Capitol Hill Tuesday pleading for US support, as they described days that felt like an "eternity" while waiting for news of loved ones.

Political upheaval in the US Congress, with last month's ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, caused a brief delay in the chamber's ability to act on Israel as it scrambled to elect a replacement.

Clutching makeshift white flags, Gazans made their way in between dead bodies and Israeli troops on Tuesday as they followed Israel's orders to flee across the Palestinian territory.

"It was so scary," said Ola al-Ghul, one of the masses of Gazan civilians displaced in the month-old war between Israel and Hamas.

"We held our hands up and we kept walking. There were so many of us, we were holding white flags," she told AFP.

Veteran officer Tzvi Koretzki has had a role in many operations against Palestinian militants in the past 25 years, but believes Israel's fight against Hamas in Gaza will be "a harder war".

Milling around the 47-year-old reservist lieutenant-colonel are dozens of young conscripts -- many half his age, with no previous experience of combat.

On the frontier between Israel and Gaza the cannons of their artillery regiment now fire day and night, at unseen targets beyond a curtain of trees hemming the perimeter.

Visiting US envoy Amos Hochstein on Tuesday urged for calm to return to Lebanon's southern border with Israel, after weeks of skirmishes following the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

"The United States does not want to see conflict in Gaza escalating and expanding into Lebanon," Hochstein told a press conference in Beirut.

"Restoring calm along the southern border is of utmost importance to the United States and it should be the highest priority for both Lebanon and Israel," he added.

Along with thousands of fellow Thai agricultural workers, Pornchai Somnuan has fled the fields to return home as Israel's war with Hamas rages in the Gaza Strip.

When Hamas gunmen attacked Israel on October 7, farmhands who had travelled thousands of miles (kilometres) to work close to the Gaza border found themselves on the front line.

In all, 34 Thai nationals were killed and 19 wounded, while 24 others were taken as hostages back to Gaza, according to Thai officials.

Hundreds of Palestinian foreign passport holders waited on Tuesday inside the war-stricken and besieged Gaza Strip to escape through the Rafah crossing with Egypt.

While most still queued nervously, the first arrivals were seen on the Egyptian side where paramedics transferred an injured woman on a stretcher into an ambulance to rush her to a hospital.

Tuesday was set to mark the fifth day on which Gaza's sole land crossing not controlled by Israel has opened in the past week, to wounded Palestinians as well as foreigners and Palestinian dual nationals.

The printing press in Beeri, an Israeli community that suffered one of Hamas's worst atrocities on October 7, has started up again in a small step towards recovery.

The kibbutz in the south of Israel, less than five kilometres (three miles) from the Gaza Strip, was home to 1,200 people.

Nearly 90 of them including children were among the 1,400 people Israeli officials say were killed in the surprise raids by Palestinian militants.

Some 30 Beeri residents remain missing and are believed to be held captive in Gaza.

It was just before 8am on October 7 when Orit Meir's cellphone beeped with a terrifying voice message from her son Almog who was at a music festival in southern Israel.

"Mum, rockets are (falling) everywhere. I don't know what is going on," the 21-year-old's message said. "Mum, I love you."

The next time she saw him, it was in video footage Hamas released from inside Gaza, showing her son lying on the ground, terrified.