UN experts demanded action on Wednesday to avert the "annihilation" of Palestinians in Gaza, as rescuers said Israeli strikes across the territory killed dozens of people.

A planned expanded offensive revealed by the Israeli military has drawn international condemnation, after UN agencies previously warned of humanitarian catastrophe in the Palestinian territory already devastated by 19 months of war.

The UN's human rights chief told AFP Wednesday that Israel's plan for an expanded offensive in the Gaza Strip represented "a very dangerous moment" for civilians there.

"What we see is only more destruction, more hatred, more dehumanisation," said Volker Turk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, during a visit to Copenhagen for a UN meeting.

"It's a very dangerous moment for civilians," he added, criticising the Israeli plan for an expanded offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Standing in the rubble of what used to be his home, Palestinian farmer Haitham Dababseh cleared stones to make space for a tent after Israeli army bulldozers destroyed his village in the occupied West Bank.

Residents of Khallet al-Dabaa and other hamlets in the West Bank's Masafer Yatta region have for years contended with violence from Israeli settlers and repeated demolitions.

Gaza's civil defence agency said Wednesday that Israeli bombardment killed at least 26 people, 15 of them in a strike on a school sheltering displaced people in Gaza City.

Israel has drawn international condemnation over its plans to expand its military offensive in the Palestinian territory, ravaged by 19 months of war. Israel's far-right finance minister called Tuesday for Gaza to be "entirely destroyed".

With the lights kept on 24 hours a day, allowed outside for just 30 minutes a few times a week, a French couple held in Iran since May 2022 on Wednesday marked three years of incarceration in the Islamic republic, with no immediate prospect of an end to their ordeal.

Cecile Kohler and Jacques Paris, held on spying charges they vehemently deny, are jailed in extremely tough conditions and feeling increasingly hopeless, according to their families.

Israel's attack on the airport in Yemen's Huthi-controlled capital Sanaa destroyed terminal buildings and caused $500 million in damage, its director told Huthi media on Wednesday.

He said earlier in a statement on X that the airport was suspending all flights until further notice after sustaining "severe damage" in the Israeli strikes.

The strikes came after a Huthi missile gouged a crater near Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport on Sunday.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday told visiting Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa to protect all people in the multi-confessional country as the former rebel Islamist chief confirmed indirect talks with Israel aiming to calm tensions.

Alarm over clashes that have left hundreds dead among among minority communities have overshadowed the first months of the government that overthrew longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in December.

Macron has been criticised for hosting a figure seen by some as a jihadist-turned-politician on his first official visit to a European country.

Hamas said one of its commanders was killed in an Israeli strike on the south Lebanon city of Sidon on Wednesday, the latest attack despite a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.

Lebanon's state-run National News Agency said the dawn strike killed one person.

Hamas named him as Khaled Ahmed al-Ahmed and said he was on his way to pray.

"As we mourn our heroic martyr, we pledge to God Almighty, and then to our people and our nation, to continue on the path of resistance," the Palestinian militant group said in a statement.

War-weary civilians have looked up at a blackened sky in Port Sudan this week as the two-year war they had fled finally reached their once-safe haven on Sudan's Red Sea coast.

"Panic is setting in, people are terrified," Port Sudan native Sami Hussein Abdel Wahab told AFP as smoke billowed behind him.

Giant plumes of thick smoke have hung in Port Sudan's skies since Sunday, when the first drone strikes, blamed on the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), struck the city.

The United States and Yemen's Huthis have agreed a ceasefire, mediators announced, saying the deal would ensure "freedom of navigation" in the Red Sea where the Iran-backed rebels have attacked shipping for months.

The agreement comes after President Donald Trump announced that the United States would end attacks against the Huthis after the rebels agreed to stop harassing ships, though he made no direct mention of recent attacks on ally Israel.