It's just before sunrise on Saturday October 7, and hundreds of Hamas militants are creeping towards Gaza's border with Israel. Within minutes they will pour across, opening the gates of hell.

On that morning nearly three weeks ago, neither the Israeli soldiers monitoring Gaza's high-tech border fence nor the civilians living in nearby towns and kibbutzim had any idea that Hamas was about to launch the bloodiest attack in Israel's 75-year history.

Families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, the Islamist group which carried out brutal attacks on Israel on October 7, called Thursday for access for the Red Cross to treat their relatives.

"We want to see where the Red Cross is. We know the Red Cross is in Gaza, so we want the world to tell the Red Cross to go and see what is going on with our families," said Merav Mor Raviv, whose uncle and aunt are detained in Gaza by Hamas along with their daughter and grandson.

The Israeli military said Thursday that a portion of the weapons used by Hamas in its October 7 attacks were manufactured in Iran or North Korea.

The military made the statement during an official media tour in which it displayed a variety of weapons recovered from communities in southern Israel attacked by the militants.

A range of landmines, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and homemade drones were part of the haul displayed.

Part of the arsenal included Iranian-made mortar rounds and North Korean RPGs.

When Israel warned civilians to leave northern Gaza, Rahma Saqallah and her family fled south. But after Israeli bombs killed her huband and three of her children, she is heading back home.

"Wherever we go, we will die," Saqallah said, as she prepared to leave the city of Khan Yunis in the south of the territory to return to Gaza City with her surviving child.

She is among roughly 600,000 Palestinians UN officials have said fled south in response to Israel's warning to evacuate "for your own safety".

The Palestinian Authority's foreign minister on Thursday said Israel's offensive in Gaza was a "war of revenge", as he called for a ceasefire in the conflict.

The visit of Riyad al-Maliki to the Hague comes as Israel said a column of tanks and infantry had launched an overnight raid into Hamas-controlled Gaza.

It also comes as European Union officials in Brussels debated the situation and were set to call for "humanitarian pauses" in Israel's war with Hamas.

EU leaders have demanded "humanitarian corridors and pauses" in Israel's war against Hamas, urging aid access for civilians trapped in besieged Gaza, where the United Nations says "nowhere is safe."

Concern is growing about the regional fallout from the conflict, with Washington warning Iran against escalation while striking facilities in Syria it says were used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and others.

Sudan's warring parties resumed talks in Saudi Arabia on Thursday aimed at ending a conflict that has raged for over six months and left thousands dead, the Saudi foreign ministry said.

Since April, the war between regular forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), commanded by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, has killed more than 9,000 people and displaced over 5.6 million.

Fighting in the war-torn Gaza Strip raged for a 20th day Thursday after Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli officials.

Since the October 7 attack, Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry says more than 7,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel's relentless retaliatory bombardments, mostly civilians and many of them children.

Here are five key developments from the past 24 hours:

- EU calls for 'pause' -

It looks like any other scrappy Tel Aviv tech start-up, with staff in hip clothing huddled around laptops and downing espressos, but they are the volunteers in a "war room" assembled to help Israel bring home the hostages.

Gunmen from the Islamist Hamas seized more than 220 people -- including Israelis, foreigners and dual-nationals -- when they stormed across Gaza's border with Israel on October 7 and, according to Israeli officials, killed more than 1,400 people.

Moran Betzer Tayar, wracked by anguish about the kidnapping of her nephew and his wife by Hamas fighters on October 7, summed up her feelings during a press conference: "On Saturday morning, our lives stopped."

The 54-year-old, speaking in Paris on Wednesday, is on a European tour with other relatives of hostages snatched by the Palestinian militant group during a raid that killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians.

Israel's retaliation has so far killed more than 6,500 people, including 2,704 children, Hamas says.