The United States circulated the final draft of a United Nations Security Council resolution late Thursday that would support international efforts to establish "an immediate and sustained cease-fire" in Gaza as part of a deal to release hostages taken captive during Hamas' surprise attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7.

No time has been set for a vote, and the draft, obtained by The Associated Press, could still be changed.

Australia will restore funding to the United Nations relief agency for Palestinians, weeks after the agency lost hundreds of millions of dollars in support following Israeli allegations that some of its Gaza-based staff participated in the Oct. 7 attack.

The Australian government also pledged Friday to increase aid for the besieged enclave, with Foreign Minister Penny Wong expressing horror at the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza.

The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza accused Israeli forces of launching an attack near an aid distribution point in war-wracked northern Gaza, killing 20 people and wounding 155 others. The Israeli military said those reports “are false,” adding it was assessing the event “with the thoroughness that it deserves.”

The violence occurred late Thursday near the Kuwaiti Roundabout, which has been a point for the distribution of aid in north Gaza over the past weeks. The health ministry said a group waiting there for aid was hit by Israeli shelling.

Medics said on Thursday that a man in his 50s was "seriously injured" in a stabbing attack in central Israel, and police said the assailant was "neutralised".

The Magen David Adom emergency service said the attack occurred outside Beit Kama kibbutz roughly 55 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem.

An explosion on Thursday at a gas depot near Tunisia's capital injured 35 people, four of them severely, civil protection services said.

"Around 6:15 am, a gas leak caused the explosion of gas cylinders in the premises of a distribution company in the oil field in Rades", southeast of Tunis, civil protection spokesperson Moez Triaa told AFP.

Yemen's Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia's state media reported Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their ongoing attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unnamed official but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine.

An Israeli general leading troops in Gaza has delivered rare public criticism of the country's political leadership, demanding it "be worthy" of the soldiers fighting against Hamas in the Palestinian territory.

Brigadier General Dan Goldfus, head of the 98th division deployed in Gaza's main southern city of Khan Younis, also appeared to enter into a row over exempting ultra-Orthodox Jews from military service.

A first boat loaded with 200 tonnes of food aid was making slow progress towards the Gaza Strip on Thursday as efforts grew to bring more humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian territory besieged by Israel.

The main U.N. aid agency in Gaza said an Israeli strike a day earlier hit one of its warehouses in the southern city of Rafah, killing an employee, although Israel later said a Hamas militant was killed in the rocket strike.

Israel plans to tell 1.4 million Palestinians displaced in the southern city of Rafah to seek shelter in central Gaza ahead of a planned military offensive into the south.

Civilians would be directed toward “humanitarian islands” that would provide temporary housing, food, water and other necessities, Israel’s chief military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said Wednesday. He did not say when this would occur, nor when the Rafah offensive might begin.

Israeli forces shot dead two Palestinian men at a hospital in the West Bank on Wednesday, an official said, the latest in a spate of killings in the occupied territory since the war in Gaza began.

The killings before dawn took place on the compound of the government hospital in Jenin, in the north of the West Bank, the hospital's director, Wissam Bakr, told AFP.