Israeli tanks shelled Hamas positions in the Gaza Strip overnight in response to continued waves of incendiary balloons across the border, the army said Thursday.

Israeli warplanes bombed the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip overnight after Palestinians fired a rocket into southern Israel, the army said.

The leaders of Israel and the United Arab Emirates will sign their historic peace accord in the White House in around three weeks, US President Donald Trump announced on Thursday.

Israel announced Thursday it was halting the "import of fuel into the Gaza Strip", the latest punitive measure over a wave of airborne fire bombs from the Palestinian territory.

The Israeli army said Monday it had killed four men laying explosives at a security fence along the Israeli-occupied sector of the Golan Heights, adjacent to Syrian-controlled territory.

With an unprecedented new surge in coronavirus cases battering Israel's economy, one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's closest confidants was dispatched to a TV studio recently to calm the nerves of a jittery nation. Instead, he dismissed expressions of some of the public's economic pain as "BS."

The flippant comment by Cabinet minister Tzachi Hanegbi is symptomatic of what critics see as a bloated, out-of-touch government. It also has become a rallying cry for anti-Netanyahu protests spreading, like the virus, across the country.

Israel said it successfully launched a new spy satellite into space on Monday as its leaders hinted it was behind a massive fire at an Iranian nuclear site last week -- potentially ratcheting up a long-running covert war.

If Israel was responsible for the fire at the heavily fortified Natanz facility, it would mark another in a series of daring strikes against Iran's nuclear program attributed to Israel, while also risking Iranian retaliation on either Israeli or Western targets.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday warned arch-foe Iran after supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted comments accusing Israel of "state terrorism" and calling for "eliminating the Zionist regime".

Twenty years after Hizbullah pushed Israel's last troops from southern Lebanon, both sides are gearing up for a possible war that neither seems to want.

An Israeli soldier was killed by a rock hurled by a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, an army spokeswoman told AFP.