Live updates: Israel-Hamas war

Egyptian, Qatari and US mediators are to meet with Israeli negotiators in the Italian capital Sunday in the latest push for a Gaza truce, Egyptian state-linked media said.

"A four-way meeting between Egyptian officials and their American and Qatari counterparts, in the presence of Israel’s intelligence chief, will be held in Rome on Sunday to reach an agreement on a truce in Gaza," Al-Qahera news, which has links to Egyptian intelligence, reported on Friday, citing a "senior official" who was not identified.

Egypt, along with Qatar and the United States, has been involved in months of mediation efforts aimed at ending the Israel-Hamas war raging in the Gaza Strip for more than nine months.

US news outlet Axios separately reported that CIA Director Bill Burns is expected to hold talks on the issue in Rome on Sunday with Israeli, Qatari and Egyptian officials.

More than 180,000 Palestinians have fled fierce fighting around the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis in four days, the United Nations said Friday.

Recent "intensified hostilities" in the Khan Yunis area, more than nine months into the Israel-Hamas war, have fuelled "new waves of internal displacement across Gaza", said the UN humanitarian agency, OCHA.

It said "about 182,000 people" have been displaced from central and eastern Khan Yunis between Monday and Thursday, and hundreds are "stranded in eastern Khan Yunis".

The Israeli military on Monday ordered the evacuation of parts of the southern city, announcing its forces would "forcefully operate" there, including in an area previously declared a safe humanitarian zone.

CIA Director William Burns is expected to meet with senior Israel, Qatari and Egyptian officials in Rome on Sunday in an effort to bring the Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal to a close, Axios reported on Friday, citing unidentified US and Israeli officials.

After weeks of Israeli bombardment left them with nowhere else to go, hundreds of Palestinians have ended up in a former Gaza prison built to hold murderers and thieves.

Yasmeen al-Dardasi said she and her family passed wounded people they were unable to help as they evacuated from a district in the southern city of Khan Younis towards its Central Correction and Rehabilitation Facility.

They spent a day under a tree before moving on to the former prison, where they now live in a prayer room. It offers protection from the blistering sun, but not much else.

An Israeli military commander said Friday that troops in the country's north were preparing for "a decisive offensive" against Lebanon's Hezbollah after months of deadly cross-border exchanges.

Israeli forces have traded near-daily fire with Hamas ally Hezbollah since the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.

Major General Ori Gordin, Israel's commanding officer in the north, told troops that "we have already eliminated more than 500 terrorists in Lebanon, the great majority of them from Hezbollah", an army statement said.

The UK's new government will drop its challenge to arrest warrants sought by an international court's prosecutor for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Downing Street confirmed on Friday.

Former prime minister Rishi Sunak's government had told the International Criminal Court (ICC) it intended to submit a challenge to prosecutor Karim Khan's request in May for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes in Gaza.

The Saint Hilarion complex, one of the oldest monasteries in the Middle East, has been put on the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites in danger due to the war in Gaza, the body said Friday.

UNESCO said the site, which dates back to the fourth century, had been put on the endangered list at the demand of Palestinian authorities and cited the "imminent threats" it faced.

"It's the only recourse to protect the site from destruction in the current context," Lazare Eloundou Assomo, director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, told AFP.