U.S. President Joe Biden says that achieving a cease-fire amid Israel's war with Hamas "is not peace" and that an important key to lasting stability is a reunited Gaza Strip and West Bank that can be governed under "a revitalized Palestinian Authority."

U.S. President Joe Biden has pressed for the immediate release of hostages seized by Hamas in Israel during talks with the leader of Qatar, which has relations with the Palestinian movement.

Biden, in San Francisco for an Asia-Pacific summit, in a telephone call with Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani "discussed the urgent need for all hostages held by Hamas to be released without further delay," a White House statement said.

A first consignment of fuel has entered Gaza after U.S. pressure on Israel, allowing communications to resume in the territory, where a hospital director on Saturday said 26 people had been killed in a strike in Khan Yunis.

A two-day blackout caused by fuel shortages ended after a first delivery arrived from Egypt late Friday, but U.N. officials continued to plead for a ceasefire, warning no part of Gaza is safe.

Israeli troops ordered the evacuation of Al-Shifa hospital "in the next hour" over loudspeakers on Saturday, an AFP journalist at the scene reported, as troops combed the facility for Hamas hideouts.

Al-Shifa hospital -- Gaza's biggest -- has become the focus of the Israel-Hamas war, now entering its seventh week after the October 7 attacks on southern Israel.

The wreckage goes on for block after devastated block. The smell is sickening. Every day, hundreds of people claw through tons of rubble with shovels and iron bars and their bare hands.

They are looking for the bodies of their children. Their parents. Their neighbors. All of them killed in Israeli missile strikes. The corpses are there, somewhere in the endless acres of destruction.

Israel's army said Friday it killed at least seven militants in two separate confrontations in the West Bank, as Hamas admitted a number of its fighters were slain amid growing violence wracking the occupied territory.

Since the October 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of clashes in the West Bank, where the Israeli army has stepped up incursions targeting militant groups.

Communications systems in the Gaza Strip were down for a second day Friday with no fuel to power the internet and phone networks, causing aid agencies to halt cross-border deliveries of humanitarian supplies even as they warned people may soon face starvation.

Israel has been pushing deeper into Gaza City, and its troops have been searching Gaza's biggest hospital, Shifa, for traces of a Hamas command center the military alleges was located under the building. They have shown what they said were a tunnel entrance and weapons found in a truck inside the compound but not yet any evidence of the command center, which Hamas and Shifa staff deny existed.

Iran will not allow Israel to defeat Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the head of Iran’s expeditionary Quds Force wrote in a message to the commander of the Hamas military wing.

However, Gen. Esmail Qaani stopped short of saying that Tehran will join the battle in order to rescue Hamas.

A dire lack of fuel in the Gaza Strip shut down all internet and phone networks Thursday, the main Palestinian telecom provider said, effectively cutting off the besieged territory from the outside world.

In a signal that Israel’s ground invasion could soon expand to the south, Palestinians in parts of southern Gaza said they received evacuation notices Thursday. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are crowded into the south, including hundreds of thousands who heeded Israel’s calls to evacuate the north to get out of the way of its offensive.

Israeli forces dropped leaflets warning Palestinians to flee parts of southern Gaza, residents said Thursday, signaling a possible expansion of their offensive to areas where hundreds of thousands of people who heeded earlier evacuation orders are crowded into U.N.-run shelters and family homes.

Meanwhile, soldiers continued searching Shifa Hospital in the north, in a raid that began early Wednesday. They displayed guns they say were found hidden in one building, but have yet to release any evidence of the central Hamas command center that Israel has said is concealed beneath the complex. Hamas and staff at the hospital, Gaza's largest, deny the allegations.