The gray film covering the faces of children rushed to Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza Thursday made it hard to distinguish between the living and the dead.

After two Israeli airstrikes flattened an entire block of apartment buildings in the Bureij refugee camp and damaged two U.N. schools-turned-shelters, rubble-covered Palestinians big and small arrived at a hospital too packed to take them.

The House has approved a nearly $14.5 billion military aid package for Israel, a muscular U.S. response to the war with Hamas but also a partisan approach by new Speaker Mike Johnson that poses a direct challenge to Democrats and President Joe Biden.

In a departure from norms, Johnson's package required that the emergency aid be offset with cuts in government spending elsewhere. That tack established the new House GOP's conservative leadership, but it also turned what would typically be a bipartisan vote into one dividing Democrats and Republicans. Biden has said he would veto the bill, which was approved 226-196, with 12 Democrats joining most Republicans on a largely party-line vote.

A fire broke out at a drug rehabilitation center in northern Iran on Friday, killing at least 27 people, state media reported.

Seventeen others were injured and taken to hospitals in Langroud city, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) northwest of the capital, Tehran, state TV said.

Faced with an increasing funding crunch, the United Nations will cut the number of refugee families receiving cash assistance in Lebanon by nearly a third next year, a spokesperson for the U.N. refugee agency said Thursday.

Due to "significant funding reductions," UNHCR and the World Food Program will give monthly cash aid to 88,000 fewer families in 2024 than in 2023, UNHCR spokeswoman Lisa Abou Khaled said.

Hezbollah on Thursday said its fighters carried out a simultaneous attack against 19 Israeli military posts along the tense Lebanon-Israel border, in the group's fiercest escalation against Israel since October 8 and on the eve of an anticipated speech by Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on the Israel-Hamas war and the border clashes.

Hezbollah said the attacks in which mortar fire and antitank missiles were used coincided with two suicide drone attacks on the main Israeli post in the occupied Shebaa Farms. Media reports said Israeli helicopters were seen transporting a large number of casualties from the site.

Palestinian militants shot and killed an Israeli civilian in the northern part of the occupied West Bank on Thursday, Israel’s military and rescue services said.

Militants began firing at a car in Einav, an Israeli settlement, causing it to turn over and killing a 35-year-old man inside, they said. Israel’s military said it set up roadblocks in the area and was pursuing the attackers.

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday signed a bill revoking Russia's ratification of a global nuclear test ban, a move that Moscow said was needed to establish parity with the United States.

Putin has said that rescinding the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, also known as the CTBT, would "mirror" the stand taken by the U.S., which has signed but not ratified the nuclear test ban.

Hundreds of foreign passport-holders and dozens of other seriously wounded Palestinians desperate to escape Israel's bombardment of Gaza crowded around the black metal gate on the Egyptian border Wednesday, hoping to pass through the enclave's only portal to the outside world for the first time since the war began.

Restless children pressed their faces against the wire mesh as families with backpacks and carry-on suitcases pushed and jostled. The air was thick with apprehension.

Russian shelling killed an 81-year-old woman in the yard of her home and a 60-year-old man in southern Ukraine's Kherson region Thursday, local authorities said. The deaths were the latest civilian casualties in Moscow's recent ramped-up bombardment of the front-line area.

Kherson is a strategic military region located on the Dnieper River near the mouth of the Black Sea. Unconfirmed reports say attacking Ukrainian troops have gained a foothold on the Russian-held side of the river during Kyiv's monthslong counteroffensive.

President Joe Biden said he thought there should be a humanitarian "pause" in the Israel-Hamas war, after his campaign speech Wednesday evening was interrupted by a protester calling for a cease-fire.

"I think we need a pause," Biden said.