The Arab League has said that peaceful coexistence in the Middle East cannot be achieved without a Palestinian state and an end to what it described as Israel's "hostile practices".

The Palestinian health ministry said Israeli forces shot dead a 57-year-old man near a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank on Friday, while the military said it had "eliminated the terrorist".

The Arab League has said that peaceful coexistence in the Middle East cannot be achieved without a Palestinian state and an end to what it described as Israel's "hostile practices".

In a resolution submitted by Egypt and Saudi Arabia and adopted on Thursday, the League said that "the failure to reach a just solution to the Palestinian cause and the hostile practices of the occupying power" remain major obstacles to "peaceful coexistence" in the region.

Israel struck a high-rise building in Gaza City on Friday after an evacuation warning, as the military stepped up operations aimed at seizing control of the famine-stricken city of some 1 million Palestinians. Strikes elsewhere in Gaza City killed at least 27 people, health officials said.

The military accused Hamas militants of using high-rises in the city for surveillance and planned ambushes, and said it would carry out "precise, targeted strikes" on militant infrastructure in the coming days.

The armed wing of Palestinian militant group Hamas released footage on Friday purporting to show two hostages seized on October 7, 2023 alive in Gaza City late last month.

The video shows one hostage in a car being driven through a neighborhood with destroyed buildings, calling on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to carry out a planned military offensive to conquer Gaza City.

Pope Leo XIV and his top diplomats thave old Israel's president that a two-state solution was the "only way out of the war," as the Vatican called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages and entry of humanitarian aid to famine-stricken Palestinians there.

The Vatican issued Thursday an unusually detailed statement following Leo's meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who also met with the Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin and foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher. Herzog, for his part, said he had asked Leo to meet with families of the hostages, and called for intensified international efforts to secure their release.

Israel estimates that its imminent offensive on Gaza City would displace one million Palestinians, a senior military official said Wednesday, as Gaza's civil defense reported dozens killed across the territory.

In Jerusalem, meanwhile, hundreds of Israeli protestors took to the streets to call for a truce and hostage release deal after nearly two years of war.

Israel's defense minister vowed Thursday to inflict the biblical 10 plagues of Egypt on Yemen's Houthi rebels after they stepped up their missile attacks against Israel.

The United Arab Emirates on Wednesday warned that any Israeli move to annex the occupied West Bank would be a "red line," without specifying its possible impact on the landmark normalization accord between the two countries,

The warning came as Israel pressed ahead with the initial stages of its latest major offensive in famine-stricken Gaza City. Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip overnight and into Wednesday killed at least 31 people, according to local hospitals.

Construction work has intensified on a major new structure at a facility key to Israel's long-suspected atomic weapons program, according to satellite images analyzed by experts. They say it could be a new reactor or a facility to assemble nuclear arms — but secrecy shrouding the program makes it difficult to know for sure.

The work at the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center near the city of Dimona will renew questions about Israel's widely believed status as the Mideast's only nuclear-armed state.