An Israeli airstrike Saturday on Damascus' Mazzeh neighborhood killed four Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers, including the head of the Quds Force's intelligence unit in Syria, media reports said.

The strike also killed Hezbollah official "Hajj Youness," who was in charge of transferring weapons from Iran by land, the reports said, noting that the targeted meeting was discussing transfering arms by land rather than by air.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally spoke Friday after a glaring, nearly four-week gap in direct communication during which fundamental differences have come into focus over a possible pathway to Palestinian statehood once the fighting in Gaza ends.

Russia on Friday urged Hamas to release all its hostages during talks with the militant group in Moscow, saying the humanitarian situation in Gaza had reached "catastrophic" levels.

Russian diplomat Mikhail Bogdanov "stressed the need for the speedy release of civilians captured during the attacks of 7 October" in talks with Hamas politburo member Musa Abu Marzouk, the Russian foreign ministry said.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog has been targeted with a criminal complaint during a visit to Switzerland, Swiss prosecutors said Friday, amid allegations of crimes against humanity over the war in Gaza.

The Federal Prosecutor's Office (BA) confirmed that it had received a criminal complaint against the Israeli president, who was at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos on Thursday to discuss the Gaza war.

The United Nations said Friday that thousands of babies had been born in conditions "beyond belief" in Gaza since the war there erupted more than three months ago.

Spokeswoman Tess Ingram, back from a recent visit to the Gaza Strip, described mothers bleeding to death and one nurse who had performed emergency caesareans on six dead women.

Rifts are emerging among top Israeli officials over the handling of the war against Hamas in Gaza. A member of the country's War Cabinet cast doubt over the strategy for releasing hostages, and the country's prime minister rejected the United States' calls to scale back its offensive.

Only a cease-fire deal can win the release of dozens of hostages still held by Islamic militants in Gaza, and claims they could be freed by other means was spreading "illusions," said former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, one of four members of the War Cabinet, in his first public statements on the course of the war.

Yemen's Houthi rebels claimed another attack on a U.S. ship early Friday, after the United States launched fresh strikes on rebel targets over their aggression towards vessels in and around the Red Sea.

While the Iran-backed rebels maintained they had struck the commercial vessel in the Gulf of Aden, the U.S. military later said the group's missiles had missed their mark.

Israel bombarded southern Gaza on Friday after it publicly sparred with its main ally the United States over the possibility of a Palestinian state, the creation of which Washington sees as the only pathway to a lasting peace.

Witnesses reported gunfire and air strikes early on Friday in Khan Yunis, the main city in the south of the Gaza Strip, where Israel says many members and leaders of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas are hiding.

The European Parliament on Thursday called for a "permanent ceasefire" in Gaza -- but on condition that all Israeli hostages are released immediately and Hamas dismantled.

Fighting has ravaged Gaza since Hamas' unprecedented October 7 attacks on Israel that allegedly resulted in the death of about 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia al-Sudani on Thursday repeated his call for the U.S.-led international anti-jihadist coalition to depart his country amid soaring regional tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.

"The end of the international coalition mission is a necessity for the security and stability of Iraq," he said during a televised event at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.