A senior Hamas official has told The Associated Press that the Palestinian militant group had expected stronger intervention from Hezbollah in its war with Israel, in a rare public appeal to its allies in the region.

Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas' decision-making political bureau, said in an interview that "we need more" from allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, in light of an Israeli air campaign that Palestinian health officials say has killed more than 7,000 people, mostly civilians, in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Six people were lightly injured when an "unidentified drone fell" on an Egyptian town on the border with Israel on Friday, the army said.

The army spokesman said the drone crashed into "a building next to Taba hospital", in the Red Sea town of the same name, across the border from the Israeli resort of Eilat.

U.S. fighter jets launched airstrikes early Friday on two locations in eastern Syria linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pentagon said, in retaliation for a slew of drone and missile attacks against U.S. bases and personnel in the region that began early last week.

The U.S. strikes reflect the Biden administration's determination to maintain a delicate balance. The U.S. wants to hit Iranian-backed groups suspected of targeting the U.S. as strongly as possible to deter future aggression, possibly fueled by Israel's war against Hamas, while also working to avoid inflaming the region and provoking a wider conflict.

Israeli forces backed by fighter jets and drones carried out a second ground raid into Gaza in as many days and struck targets on the outskirts of Gaza City, the military said Friday, as it prepares for a widely expected ground invasion of the Hamas-ruled territory.

U.S. warplanes meanwhile struck targets in eastern Syria that the Pentagon said were linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard after a string of attacks on U.S. forces by Iran-backed fighters, adding to the already high regional tensions fueled by the three-week-old Gaza war.

Ten fighters from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) were killed, Iraqi Kurdish authorities said Thursday, as Turkey said it launched renewed air strikes on northern Iraq.

Turkey has intensified its cross-border air raids against Kurdish targets in northeastern Syria and northern Iraq in retaliation for an October 1 suicide bombing in Ankara which injured two policemen.

Douglas Macgregor --a retired U.S. Army colonel and a former senior adviser at the Pentagon -- has said that U.S. and Israeli special forced had recently gone into Gaza where they were “shot to pieces.”

“Some of our special ops forces and Israeli special ops forces went into Gaza to reconnoiter, to plan for where they might want to go to free hostages and make an impact and they were shot to pieces and took heavy losses, as I understand,” Macgregor said in an interview with U.S. far-right media personality Tucker Carlson.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he will be held accountable for the shocking October 7 attack by Hamas militants, but that will only come after Israel’s war against the militant group.

In a nationally televised address Wednesday night, Netanyahu said he was busy plotting a ground invasion of Gaza, though he refused to say when that might happen. He also expressed sorrow over the attack, which allegedly killed more than 1,400 Israelis and saw over 200 others taken captive in Gaza.

American and allied forces deployed in Iraq and Syria as part of an international anti-jihadist coalition have been repeatedly targeted by drone and missile attacks this month.

Although the attacks have not been claimed by a known group with documented links to Iran, Washington says Tehran is involved and has threatened to respond "decisively" to strikes by its proxies.

An Israeli strike has killed the wife, son and young daughter of Al-Jazeera Arabic’s bureau chief in Gaza, Wael Dahdouh.

Footage aired on the Qatar-based TV network showed the veteran journalist, still wearing his blue body armor marked “press,” weeping over his son’s corpse on a hospital floor.

Israeli troops and tanks launched a brief ground raid into northern Gaza overnight into Thursday, the military said, striking several militant targets in order to "prepare the battlefield" ahead of a widely expected ground invasion after more than two weeks of devastating air raids.

The raid came after the U.N. warned it is on the verge of running out of fuel in the Gaza Strip, forcing it to sharply curtail relief efforts in the territory, which has also been under a complete siege since Hamas' bloody rampage across southern Israel ignited the war earlier this month.