France strongly condemns “aggression” against Israel and stands with it in the face of rocket attacks from Gaza, the French president told the Israeli prime minister on Wednesday in a phone call.

Francois Hollande "expressed France's solidarity (with Israel) in the face of rocket fire from Gaza" and told Benjamin Netanyahu "that France strongly condemns these aggressions," said a statement from the French presidency.

Rockets capable of hitting deeper into Israel than ever before and naval commandos launching a beachhead assault show that Hamas has increased its capabilities with help from Iran and Syria, analysts said Wednesday.

The last Israeli offensive against Gaza was meant to have degraded the Palestinian militant group's capabilities but less than two years later, Hamas is firing new longer-range projectiles, they said.

Jordan's government has blocked nine unlicensed news websites, in line with a 2012 law criticized as a threat to freedom of expression, a global media watchdog said on Wednesday.

"The Jordanian government aims to use this licencing system to ensure that it controls the Internet and the information published on it," said Virginie Dangles of Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

An Egyptian soldier was killed Wednesday when a roadside bomb targeted an armored vehicle in the restive Sinai Peninsula, medical and security officials said.

Four soldiers were also wounded in the attack near the north Sinai capital of El-Arish, the officials said.

Italian-Swedish diplomat Staffan de Mistura is to be named the new U.N. mediator for Syria on Wednesday, taking on the Herculean task of finding a political solution to the devastating civil war, diplomats said.

He is to replace Lakhdar Brahimi who resigned in May after two rounds of peace talks yielded no concrete results and as the conflict escalated into a fourth year, killing more than 162,000.

The U.S. Treasury placed a United Arab Emirates company on its sanctions blacklist Wednesday for selling specialty oil products to the Syrian government.

Boosting the pressure on the regime of Bashar Assad, the Treasury at the same time named for sanctions two alleged front companies for Syria's Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC).

Hamas rocket and mortar attacks on Israel may force the Jewish state, unable to quell the relentless fire with retaliatory air strikes, to invade the Gaza Strip and open up a long and deadly conflict.

- What are Hamas's objectives?

In Gaza's stifling midday heat, grieving relatives of a family killed in an Israeli air strike sit outside a mosque, weary from their Ramadan fast and nervously anticipating the next deadly blast.

The mourners, most of them men, have come to bury six members of the Hammad family, including a teenager and two women, killed when a missile slammed into their home in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun.

Iraq's Christian leaders called on the European Union on Wednesday to help the country avoid a civil war threatening the future of their "very fragile" minority.

"Europeans have a moral duty vis-a-vis Iraq," said the country's most senior Christian leader, Chaldean Patriarch Louis Sako, who flew into Brussels to meet EU officials, including the bloc's Council president Herman Van Rompuy.

Twenty members of the Islamic State (IS) were killed in Syrian air force raids Wednesday against the jihadists' bastion in Raqa, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The report comes after Syrian rebels killed at least 14 people, among them women, among them women, in the village of Khatab in the central province of Hama overnight, state media and the Observatory said.