U.S. President Joe Biden is aiming to get a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal by the end of next week while also trying to deter Iran and Hezbollah from conducting an attack on Israel that could undermine this effort, U.S. officials have told U.S. news portal Axios.

Gaza has recorded its first polio case in 25 years, the Palestinian health ministry said, after U.N. chief Antonio Guterres called for pauses in the Israel-Hamas war to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children.

A U.S. official warned that Iran would face "cataclysmic" consequences and derail momentum toward a Gaza truce if it strikes Israel in response to the killing of a top Hamas official.

Hamas said it rejected "new conditions" in a Gaza ceasefire proposal that U.S.-led mediators presented during two days of talks in Qatar.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz told his French and British counterparts Friday that Israel expects support "in attacking" Iran if it strikes Israeli territory.

"If Iran attacks, we expect the coalition to join Israel not only in defense but also in attacking significant targets in Iran," Katz told his French and UK counterparts during their visit to Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli military issued rare and swift condemnations of the attack by Israeli settlers on a village in the occupied West Bank that killed at least one Palestinian and injured another.

Yemen's rival parties are making military preparations and threatening to return to war as hunger and cholera are increasing in the Arab world's poorest nation, U.N. officials said Thursday.

U.N. special representative Hans Grundberg told the Security Council that despite serious efforts to shield Yemen, it has been drawn into the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, with Houthi rebels continuing to attack ships in the Red Sea and the United States and United Kingdom responding with strikes on military targets in Houthi-controlled areas.

The smell of fuel wafts from storage tanks to Dovi Sonny's apartment -- a long-time irritant, and now a major worry after Hezbollah revealed that the facility in northern Israel was in its sights.

Sonny, 66, has no idea what would happen should a rocket hit one of the towering circular containers about 100 meters (yards) from his building in Haifa.

With Gaza largely in ruins after more than 10 months of war, the Hamas-run territory's health ministry has struggled to count the death toll, which on Thursday surpassed 40,000.

Israel has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the daily figures put out by the ministry and U.S. President Joe Biden did so too in the early stages of the war.

Two U.S. officials said the first day of Gaza talks in Doha was "very good" and that some progress was made, as another U.S. official called the discussions “constructive.”