Top international diplomats have been discussing strategies to keep the Gaza war from spreading, as Palestinian and Israel authorities claimed thousands of military and civilian deaths.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the European Union's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, were on separate trips to the region to try to quell the three-month-old war from spilling over into Lebanon, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Red Sea shipping lanes.
Israel and Hezbollah often trade fire across the Lebanese border, the West Bank is seething with anger, and the Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen seem determined to continue attacks on Red Sea shipping until Israel stops bombarding Palestinians in Gaza.
Blinken was in Amman, Jordan, after stops in Turkey and Greece. Borrell was on a trip to Lebanon.
"We have an intense focus on preventing this conflict from spreading," Blinken told reporters before heading to Jordan.
Lebanon's Iranian-backed Hezbollah group is claiming to have hit a key Israeli observation post with 62 rockets as a "preliminary response" to the killing of Hamas' deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri on Tuesday.
Arouri was killed by a drone in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, in an attack widely attributed to Israel.
Lebanese Islamist militant group Jama'a Islamiya also said it had fired two volleys of rockets at Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel.
Israel's military said it had responded to the rocket attacks with a drone strike on "the terrorist cell responsible for the launches".
Hezbollah said five of its fighters had been killed in Israeli strikes.
Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said Israeli forces had completed dismantling the Hamas militant group's "military framework" in northern Gaza and had killed around 8,000 militants in that area.
"We are now focused on dismantling Hamas in the centre of and south of the (Gaza) strip," he said in an online briefing."
Fighting will continue during 2024. We are operating according to a plan to achieve the war's goals, to dismantle Hamas in the north and south," Hagari said.
Israel's bombing and incursions of Gaza began after Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking 240 hostage, according to Israeli officials.
More than 100 hostages are still believed to be held by Hamas.
Israel's offensive, aimed at wiping out Hamas, had killed 22,722 Palestinians by Saturday, according to Palestinian health officials, and devastated the tiny Gaza enclave.
Most of Gaza's 2.3 million population are displaced amid acute shortages of food, water and medicine.'On Saturday, fighting raged on in Gaza, especially in and near the southern city of Khan Younis, where the Israeli military said it had killed members of Hamas, which rules the densely populated coastal strip.
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA said an Israeli air strike on a residential building on Saturday night killed at least 12 people and wounded 50, and another strike on a school in central Gaza had killed as many as four.
Israel denies targeting civilians and says Hamas fighters embed themselves among civilian populations, working from tunnels beneath facilities like hospitals.
Hamas, which is backed by Iran and is sworn to Israel's destruction, denies using civilians as human shields.
In Istanbul, Blinken held talks with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and President Tayyip Erdogan, a fierce critic of Israel's military actions in Gaza. Turkey, which unlike most of its NATO allies does not class Hamas as a terrorist organisation, has offered to mediate.
Borrell expressed alarm in Beirut about exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon and the risk that Lebanon could be dragged into the Gaza conflict.
"Diplomatic channels have to stay open. War is not the only option – it's the worst option," Borrell said.
