Spain, which has strongly criticized Israel's offensive in Gaza, has cancelled a contract to buy 168 firing posts and 1,680 anti-tank missiles from Israeli defense company Rafael, Spanish media reported Wednesday.

The deal was worth 287.5 million euros ($327 million), according to top-selling daily Spanish newspaper El País, which cited unnamed government sources.

Shootings have erupted nearly daily this week in the Gaza Strip in the vicinity of new hubs where desperate Palestinians are being directed to collect food. Witnesses say nearby Israeli troops have opened fire. Hospital officials say at least 80 people have been killed and hundreds wounded.

The Israeli military has said it fired warning shots in several instances, and has also fired directly at a few "suspects" who ignored warnings and approached its forces. It has denied opening fire on civilians, and has not claimed Hamas fired in the area of the hubs, though it says it is still investigating.

The Egyptian man charged with injuring a dozen people in Boulder, Colorado, in an attack on demonstrators seeking the release of Israeli hostages is among hundreds of thousands of people known to overstay their visas each year in the United States.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, was born in Egypt and moved three years ago to Colorado Springs, where he lived with his wife and five children, according to state court documents. He lived for 17 years in Kuwait.

Israel hit southern Syria with a series of strikes overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday, a rights NGO said, as Israel said it had targeted weapons belonging to Syrian authorities following the launch of projectiles.

"Violent explosions shook southern Syria, notably the town of Quneitra and the Daraa region, following Israeli aerial strikes" that caused no casualties, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, with Israel blaming the Damascus government for the two projectiles launched onto its territory from Syria.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Syria's interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa bears responsibility for two projectiles that the Israeli military earlier said had been fired from Syrian territory.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday demanded Yemen's Houthi rebels release dozens of aid workers, including UN staff, a year after their arrest.

The United States has begun reducing its military presence in Syria with a view to eventually closing all but one of its bases there, the U.S. envoy for the country has said in an interview.

Syrian authorities and a Kurdish-led force exchanged Monday more than 400 prisoners as part of a deal reached earlier this year between the two sides.

The exchange in the northern city of Aleppo is a step in the process of confidence- building measures between the government in Damascus and the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. A similar exchange took place in April.

The Israeli army said on Tuesday that three of its soldiers were killed in northern Gaza.

The latest deaths bring to 424 the number of Israeli troops killed in the Palestinian territory since the start of the conflict.

Palestinian health officials and witnesses say Israeli forces fired on people as they headed toward an aid distribution site on Tuesday, killing at least 27, in the third such incident in three days. The army said it fired "near a few individual suspects" who left the designated route, approached its forces and ignored warning shots.

The near-daily shootings have come after an Israeli and U.S.-backed foundation established aid distribution points inside Israeli military zones, a system it says is designed to circumvent Hamas. The United Nations has rejected the new system, saying it doesn't address Gaza's mounting hunger crisis and allows Israel to use aid as a weapon.