U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that more countries are ready to normalize relations with Israel but the decision would await a broader regional agreement.

The United States named a veteran diplomat as the civilian lead in a body monitoring the Gaza ceasefire, seeking to push forward a durable end to the war.

Spain's top criminal court said Friday it had opened an investigation for alleged complicity in crimes against humanity or genocide into executives at the steelmaker Sidenor for trading with an Israeli arms company.

Spain, one of the fiercest critics of the Israeli offensive in Gaza, said it had stopped exchanging weapons with the country after the conflict started with the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.

Four people were killed and another 12 wounded at a train station in northern Ukraine on Friday, police said, when a 23-year-old man detonated an explosive device during document checks.

"State Border Guard Service employees were checking the documents of passengers on a diesel train. At that moment, one of them took out an explosive device on the platform, which then detonated," the national police service said in a statement, adding that the perpetrator was among those killed.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday he did not believe that Israel would annex the West Bank, playing down this week's Knesset vote to advance two bills.

Rubio said Israeli lawmakers had held the vote as a political stunt to embarrass U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A Ukraine drone crashed into an apartment block in a Moscow suburb on Friday, wounding a young boy and four others, officials said, as both countries traded another night of aerial strikes.

Four people were killed in Israeli air strikes in eastern and southern Lebanon on Thursday, according to the country's health ministry, with the Israeli military saying it had attacked Hezbollah targets.

The ministry reported that strikes in mountainous areas in the east "resulted in an initial death toll of two" people.

Agence France-Presse renewed its call on Thursday on Israel to conduct a full investigation into an attack in 2023 that killed a Reuters journalist in Lebanon and wounded several others, two of them from AFP.

On October 13, 2023, an attack killed Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah and wounded six other journalists, including AFP reporters Dylan Collins and Christina Assi, who had to have her right leg amputated.

Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Thursday that Saudi Arabia should "keep riding camels" if it asks for a Palestinian state in exchange for normalizing ties with Israel.

"If Saudi Arabia tells us normalization in exchange for a Palestinian state, friends, no thank you", Smotrich said at a conference in Israel.

Syrian authorities have agreed a ceasefire with a group of jihadists led by Frenchman Oumar Diaby in northwest Syria, sources from both sides told AFP on Thursday.

Government forces surrounded the camp of Firqatul Ghuraba ("the Foreigners' Brigade") on Wednesday, leading to the first clashes with jihadists under Syria's new leadership since the ousting in December of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad.