Israel and the United States said they have made progress toward resolving a rift over U.S. weapons shipments after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accused President Joe Biden's administration of slowing down deliveries.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met Wednesday top officials over three days in Washington as he voiced hope for quietly working through disagreements with Israel's vital ally, drawing an implicit contrast to Netanyahu's more confrontational approach.

Two people were killed in an Israeli strike on southern Syria on Wednesday, the official SANA news agency reported, citing a military source.

According to the NGO Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the strike targeted the service center of a foundation affiliated with pro-Iranian groups including Lebanon's Hezbollah.

Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin on Wednesday urged warring parties in the Middle East to accept "peace proposals," saying the region including Lebanon "doesn't need war."

"The Middle East is going through a critical moment," Parolin told a press conference in Beirut during a days-long visit to Lebanon.

The Paris appeals court ruled on Wednesday that an international arrest warrant for Syrian President Bashar Assad issued by France for alleged complicity in war crimes during Syria's civil war is valid and remains in place, lawyers said.

Jeanne Sulzer and Clemence Witt, lawyers who represented the plaintiffs and non-governmental organizations who filed the complaint against the Syrian president in France, hailed the decision as a historic judgment and "a giant step forward in the fight against impunity."

Fighting raged Wednesday between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants in Gaza's southern city of Rafah, witnesses said.

Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip however appeared to ease days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the "intense phase" of the war was nearing its end, and as his defense minister visited Washington for crisis talks.

With U.S. soldiers within shouting distance of Gaza's bombed-out coast, the American military is taking another stab at delivering aid to hungry Palestinians by sea.

When Mujahid Abadi stepped outside to see if Israeli forces had entered his uncle's neighborhood, he was shot in the arm and the foot. That was only the start of his ordeal. Hours later, beaten and bloodied, he found himself strapped to the searing hood of an Israeli military jeep driving down a road.

The army initially said Abadi was a suspected militant, but later acknowledged he had not posed a threat to Israeli forces and was caught in crossfire with militants.

Suspected attacks by Yemen's Houthi rebels early Wednesday targeted a ship in the Gulf of Aden, while a separate attack claimed by Iraqi militants allied with the rebels targeted the southern Israeli port city of Eilat, authorities said.

The attacks follow the departure of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower after an eight-month deployment in which the aircraft carrier led the American response to the Houthi assaults. Those attacks have reduced shipping drastically through the route crucial to Asian, Middle East and European markets in a campaign the Houthis say will continue as long as the Israel-Hamas war rages in the Gaza Strip.

Israelis who were taken hostage or lost loved ones during Hamas' Oct. 7 attack are suing the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians, claiming it has helped finance the militants by paying agency staffers in U.S. dollars and thereby funneling them to money-changers in Gaza who allegedly give a cut to Hamas.

But the agency, known as UNWRA, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the staffers were paid in dollars by their own choice. Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank don't have their own national currency, and primarily use Israeli shekels.

Ten children per day are losing one or both of their legs in the war in Gaza, the head of the U.N. agency supporting Palestinian refugees said Tuesday.

"Basically we have every day 10 children who are losing one leg or two legs on average," UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini told reporters in Geneva.