Israel's military said Monday it had apprehended members of an Iran-backed cell in southern Syria, the second such operation it has announced in the past week.

Since the December overthrow of Syria's longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes primarily on military sites and carried out cross-border ground raids.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday made his first public appearance since the outbreak of his country's recent 12-day war with Israel, taking part in a religious ceremony in Tehran, state media reported.

Britain reestablished full diplomatic relations with Syria on Saturday, more than a decade after cutting ties, as Foreign Secretary David Lammy met the country's new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was sending a negotiating team to Qatar Sunday for talks on a truce in Gaza, but rejected Hamas's earlier ceasefire proposals.

One person was killed and five people were wounded in three Israeli drone strikes in Lebanon's south on Saturday, the Health Ministry said.

A strike on a car in Bint Jbeil "killed one person and wounded two others," the ministry said in a statement carried by the official National News Agency (NNA), noting the toll was provisional.

Syrian rescuers evacuated residential areas in Latakia province because of major forest fires, authorities said on Friday.

Hamas has said it is ready to start talks "immediately" on a proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza, where the civil defense agency said Israel's ongoing offensive killed more than 50 people.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Russia just wanted to "keep killing people" and hinted at sanctions  after Moscow launched its largest ever drone and missile attack on Ukraine in the three-year-old war.

Trump said Friday he was "very unhappy" about his telephone call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, saying: "He wants to go all the way, just keep killing people, it's no good".

Syrian foreign minister Asaad al-Shaibani said on Friday that Damascus was willing to cooperate with Washington to reimplement the 1974 disengagement agreement with Israel.

In a statement following a phone call with his American counterpart Marco Rubio, Shaibani said he expressed Syria's "aspiration to cooperate with the United States to return to the 1974 disengagement agreement".

Russian leader Vladimir Putin stressed in a call with U.S. President Donald Trump that the Iran conflicts and others in the Middle East should be solved diplomatically.

"From the Russian side, the importance of settling all disputed issues, disagreements and conflictual situations be solved exclusively by politico-diplomatic means was stressed," Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters after the call.