Israel is waging a "last-minute" offensive to convince its allies to halt talks on reviving the Iran nuclear deal with a flurry of diplomatic trips, calls to Western leaders and press briefings.

From card games to horse rides, women in Gaza are spending their summer nights outdoors to seek solace from daily hardships in the Palestinian enclave.

After Washington's latest attacks, AFP unpacks the deployments in a porous border region where the U.S. and its Iran-backed rivals operate in close proximity.

The Euphrates river bisects the eastern province of Deir Ezzor where a patchwork of rival forces have taken up positions on opposing river banks. 

U.S. military airstrikes in eastern Syria were a message to Iran and Tehran-backed militias that targeted American troops this month and several other times over the past year, the Pentagon said.

Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, told reporters on Wednesday that the U.S. airstrikes overnight on facilities used by militias backed by Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard demonstrated that "the United States will not hesitate to defend itself against Iranian and Iran-backed aggression when it occurs."

Dozens of Islamic Jihad militants have displayed life-sized replicas of their rockets during a parade in the Gaza Strip, in a show of defiance after three days of heavy fighting with Israel earlier this month.

The flare-up left 49 Palestinians dead, including the militant group's top two commanders and 10 other fighters, before an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire took effect. The militants fired some 1,100 rockets, but no one on the Israeli side was killed or seriously wounded.

Younes Ajil turns on the tap in his home but nothing comes out: dozens of villages are without running water in drought-hit Iraq, surviving on sporadic tanker-truck deliveries and salty wells.

Israel's prime minister called on President Joe Biden and Western powers to call off an emerging nuclear deal with Iran, saying that negotiators are letting Tehran manipulate the talks and that an agreement would reward Israel's enemies.

Yair Lapid called the emerging agreement a "bad deal" and suggested that Biden has failed to honor red lines he had previously promised to set.

Iran's foreign ministry on Wednesday denied any link with groups targeted by U.S. air strikes in Syria, contradicting a claim by Washington.

France has made several attempts over the years to heal the wounds with former colony Algeria, but it refuses to "apologize or repent" for the 132 years of often brutal rule that ended in 1962.

French President Emmanuel Macron heads to Algeria on Thursday seeking to soothe festering diplomatic tensions with an increasingly important supplier of gas to Europe.