Britain's former prime minister Tony Blair has strongly denied an Israeli media report linking him to talks last week about the resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza in other countries.

Channel 12 claimed on Sunday that Blair, who left office in 2007 and served as a Middle East envoy charged with building up Palestinian institutions, was in Israel last week.

Islamic State group jihadists killed nine Syrian government troops and militiamen in an attack on military posts in the eastern desert, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Tuesday.

"IS cells carried out a surprise attack, targeting positions of the regime army and National Defence Forces in the western countryside of Deir-Ezzor, killing nine of them and wounding more than 20," the Britain-based war monitor said.

An explosive drone targeting the U.S.-led anti-jihadist coalition in Iraq was shot down at Arbil airport on Tuesday, authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan said.

The attack was claimed by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a loose alliance of Iran-linked armed groups that oppose U.S. support for Israel in the Gaza war.

Turkey on Tuesday detained 33 people suspected of spying for Israel's Mossad intelligence service, Turkish media reported, without specifying the nationalities of those detained.

The suspects were rounded up in raids across eight provinces around Istanbul, the private DHA and state-run Anadolu news agencies reported, adding that their mission included conducting abductions and carrying out reconnaissance work.

Israel launched pre-dawn air strikes near the Syrian capital on Tuesday, state media said citing a military source, at a time of heightened regional tensions over the Gaza war.

Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Israel had targeted a military position that also housed members of Lebanon's Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah, near the town of Kanaker.

Shelling and missile strikes rocked the length of the Gaza Strip overnight into Tuesday, after Israel's army warned its war against the territory's Hamas rulers will last through 2024.

Nearly three months of conflict have claimed almost 22,000 lives in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, and devastated much of the besieged territory.

Israel's Supreme Court struck down a key component of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's contentious judicial overhaul Monday, delivering a landmark decision that could reopen the fissures in Israeli society that preceded the country's ongoing war against Hamas.

The planned overhaul sparked months of mass protests, threatened to trigger a constitutional crisis between the judicial and legislative branches of government, and rattled the cohesion of Israel's powerful military.

Israeli troops killed four Palestinians during a raid in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, sources on both sides said, with the army describing the four as "terrorists".

"Four Palestinians were martyred by occupation bullets in the town of Azzun," the Palestinian health ministry said.

Israel warned its war against Hamas will continue throughout 2024 as unrelenting strikes killed two dozen people in Gaza and the Palestinian militant group fired a rocket barrage at the stroke of midnight.

Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a New Year's message that some of the 300,000 army reservists would get a break from the war, in order to prepare for the "prolonged fighting" ahead.

The U.S. military said that its forces opened fire on Houthi rebels after they attacked a cargo ship in the Red Sea, killing several of them in an escalation of the maritime conflict linked to the war in Gaza. "We're going to act in a self-defense going forward," a White House official said.

In a series of statements, the U.S. Central Command said the crew of the USS Gravely destroyer first shot down two anti-ship ballistic missiles fired at the Singapore-flagged Maersk Hangzhou late Saturday, after the vessel reported getting hit by a missile earlier that evening as it sailed through the Southern Red Sea.