The new US ambassador to Israel prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Friday, delivering a handwritten message from President Donald Trump calling for peace in Israel.

Mike Huckabee, a former Republican governor, has long been an outspoken supporter of Israel, backing calls to annex the Israeli-occupied West Bank before such talk became increasingly mainstream.

He presented his diplomatic credentials to Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Thursday, as Israel's 18-month war against Hamas Palestinian militants continues in the Gaza Strip.

By seizing large swathes of the Gaza Strip, Israel is redrawing the map of the Palestinian territory, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, making it increasingly "unlivable".

On Wednesday, Defence Minister Israel Katz said the military has transformed vast areas representing 30 percent of Gaza into buffer zones and displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Agnes Levallois, lecturer at the Foundation for Strategic Research, said that leaving the buffer zones cleared and empty could be an end in itself.

Lebanon's health ministry said Israeli air strikes killed two people in the south on Friday, with Israel announcing attacks in the same areas targeting Hezbollah militants.

Despite a November 27 ceasefire that sought to halt more than a year of conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, Israel has continued to conduct near-daily strikes in Lebanon.

An Israeli attack on "a car on the Sidon-Ghaziyeh road resulted in one dead", a Lebanese health ministry statement said on the fourth straight day of Israeli attacks in the south.

US strikes on a Yemeni fuel port killed at least 80 people, Huthi rebels said Friday, in the deadliest attack of Washington's 15-month campaign against the Iran-backed group.

Thursday's strikes on Ras Issa aimed to cut off supplies and funds for the rebels that control large swathes of the Arabian Peninsula's poorest country, the US military said.

Images broadcast by a Huthi-run television channel showed large blazes lighting up the night sky following the latest in an intensified barrage of attacks under US President Donald Trump.

It had been nearly two years since AFP journalist Abdelmoneim Abu Idris Ali set foot in his home in war-torn Khartoum, after the sound of children playing in the street gave way to the fearsome fire of machine guns.

Sudan's once-peaceful capital awoke to the sound of bombs and gunfire on April 15, 2023 as war broke out between its two most powerful generals -- army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Seated on the pavement outside a bank in central Damascus, Abu Fares's face is worn with exhaustion as he waits to collect a small portion of his pension.

"I've been here for four hours and I haven't so much as touched my pension," said the 77-year-old, who did not wish to give his full name.

"The cash dispensers are under-stocked and the queues are long," he continued.

Since the overthrow of president Bashar al-Assad last December, Syria has been struggling to emerge from the wake of nearly 14 years of civil war, and its banking sector is no exception.

Hamas on Thursday signalled its rejection of Israel's latest truce proposal and called for a "comprehensive" deal to end the 18-month-long war.

The Palestinian militants' chief negotiator spoke out after civil defence rescuers in Gaza said new Israeli air strikes killed at least 40 people, most of them in camps for displaced civilians, as Israel pressed its offensive in the Palestinian territory.

The Israeli military said it was looking into reports of the strikes.

Iran on Thursday filed a challenge at the International Court of Justice against Canada, Sweden, Ukraine and Britain over a UN aviation body's ruling against it related to the shooting down of a passenger plane in 2020.

The four countries had citizens on a Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737-800 that was downed shortly after takeoff from Tehran on January 8, 2020. All 176 people on board were killed.

Three days later, Iran admitted that its military fired two surface-to-air missiles at the Kyiv-bound plane but said it was by mistake.

Clashes between Sudanese paramilitaries and the army have killed at least 57 civilians in the besieged Darfur city of El-Fasher, medical and activist sources said Thursday, with civilians fearing a looming bloodbath as fighters close in.

The local resistance committee, a grassroots aid group, said the civilians were killed on Wednesday in clashes following an artillery attack by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), at war with the army since April 2023.

More than three weeks after an Israeli military ambush killed 15 of her husband's fellow medics, Nafiza al-Nsasrah says she still has no idea where he is being held.

"We have no information, no idea which prison he's in or where he is being held, or what his health condition is," Nsasrah told AFP, showing a photograph of her husband Asaad in his medic's uniform at the wheel of an ambulance.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said Sunday that Nsasrah was in Israeli custody after being "forcibly abducted" when Israeli soldiers opened fire on a convoy of ambulances on March 23.