Israel hit a car used by Hezbollah in Syria, close to the Lebanese border, also striking near Damascus Thursday, a war monitor said, hours after similar attacks near the Syrian capital.

"An Israeli drone targeted a car belonging to Hezbollah in the Homs countryside near the Syrian-Lebanese border," said Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Israeli forces in war-torn Gaza opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians at an aid distribution point Thursday, killing at least 104 people and wounding over 700 according to Palestinian health officials.

Israeli sources confirmed that troops shot at the crowd, believing they "posed a threat," in the pre-dawn incident in Gaza City in the north of the besieged territory.

Israel has carried out strikes near Damascus, Syria's defense ministry said, the latest reported attack amid soaring regional tensions since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

"The Israeli enemy launched air strikes from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan, targeting a number of sites in the Damascus countryside," the ministry said in a statement Wednesday.

A coalition of civil society groups on Wednesday accused the Emirati hosts of a World Trade Organization meeting of "heavy-handed restrictions", saying some of its members have been detained at the talks.

Our World Is Not for Sale (OWINFS), representing more than a dozen civil society groups, said it has complained to the WTO following a series of incidents at the body's 13th ministerial conference in the United Arab Emirates capital Abu Dhabi.

The Gaza war's reported Palestinian death toll neared 30,000 Wednesday as fighting raged in the Hamas-run territory despite mediators insisting a truce with Israel could be just days away.

Another 91 people were killed in overnight Israeli bombardment, the health ministry said.

The mayors of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were set to win new terms as preliminary results from Israel's delayed municipal elections trickled in on Wednesday.

Turkish drone strikes in northeastern Syria on Wednesday killed at least three members of a local Christian force and wounded others, including civilians, a Kurdish official and a Syrian opposition war monitor said.

There was no immediate comment from Ankara. Turkey has been attacking Kurdish fighters in Syria for years but attacks on the fighters from the country's Christian minority have been rare.

Operatives from Iran and Hezbollah are working inside Yemen to support Houthi insurgents' attacks on international shipping, a U.S. official said.

Tim Lenderking, the U.S. special envoy for Yemen, told a Senate subcommittee that Iran's clerical state was "equipping and facilitating" the Houthi attacks, which have triggered retaliatory U.S. and British strikes on Yemen.

Israel and Hamas are inching toward a new deal that would free some of the roughly 130 hostages held in the Gaza Strip in exchange for a weekslong pause in the war, now in its fifth month.

U.S. President Joe Biden says a deal could go into effect as early as Monday, ahead of what is seen as an unofficial deadline — the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, around March 10.

A rocket exploded late Tuesday night off the side of a ship traveling through the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen, authorities said, the latest suspected attack to be carried out by Yemen's Houthi rebels.

The attack comes as the Houthis continue a series of assaults at sea over Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip and as the U.S. and its allies launch airstrikes trying to stop them.