US Secretary of State Antony Blinken landed in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday to discuss efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and ramp up aid deliveries to the Palestinian territory.

The US top diplomat touched down in Jeddah where he was to meet Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said an AFP journalist on board, the first stop on Blinken's sixth Middle East tour since the Israel-Hamas war started on October 7.

Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's former White House adviser and his son-in-law, praised the "very valuable" potential of Gaza's "waterfront property," suggesting that Israel should remove civilians while it "cleans up" the area.

"Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable, if people would focus on building up livelihoods," Kushner said in an interview dated Feb. 15, posted earlier this month on the YouTube channel of the Middle East Initiative, a program of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and reported first on Tuesday by The Guardian. "If you think about all the money that's gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions, if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done?"

Explosions and shootings shook the Gaza Strip's biggest hospital and surrounding neighborhoods as Israeli forces stormed through the facility for a second day Tuesday. The military said it had killed 50 Hamas militants in the hospital, but it could not be independently confirmed that the dead were combatants.

The raid was a new blow to the Shifa medical complex, which had only partially resumed operations after a destructive Israeli raid in November. Thousands of Palestinian patients, medical staff and displaced people were trapped inside the sprawling complex Tuesday as heavy fighting between troops and Hamas fighters raged in nearby districts.

Turkey carried out a new round of airstrikes targeting Kurdish militants in neighboring Iraq on Tuesday, Turkey's defense ministry said, hours after a Turkish soldier was killed and four others were wounded in an attack in the region.

Turkey often launches strikes against targets in Syria and Iraq it believes to be affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a banned Kurdish separatist group that has waged an insurgency against Turkey since the 1980s.

Mourners held funeral prayers Wednesday morning outside a hospital in central Gaza for 28 people killed in three separate Israeli airstrikes on urban refugee camps.

Associated Press footage showed mourners praying over the bodies, which were wrapped in funeral shrouds, before the bodies were taken away in donkey carts for burial.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he remains determined to carry out a ground invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, despite the misgivings of U.S. President Joe Biden.

Netanyahu told a parliamentary committee Tuesday that he would wait to hear proposals from the U.S. “out of respect to the president” about ways to protect the civilian population in Rafah before ordering the operation.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant will meet with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin next week in Washington, a U.S. defense official confirmed Tuesday.

The official, who spoke under condition of anonymity to provide details not yet made public, said Austin and Gallant plan to discuss securing the release of Hamas-held hostages, humanitarian aid to Gaza and protecting those in Rafah.

The incoming Palestinian prime minister said on Tuesday that he will appoint a technocratic government and establish an independent trust fund to oversee Gaza's reconstruction.

In a mission statement acquired by The Associated Press, Mohammad Mustafa laid out wide-ranging plans for the kind of revitalized Palestinian Authority called for by the United States as part of its postwar vision for resolving the conflict.

Israel’s intelligence chief has left Doha after talks aimed at trying to reach a cease-fire, Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed al-Ansari said Tuesday at a news conference, adding that Qatari officials were “cautiously optimistic” about the negotiations.

Al-Ansari said Mossad chief David Barnea had left Qatar already. He said technical negotiations between Israel and Hamas were ongoing, with Qatar carrying messages between the parties.

The U.N. warned Tuesday that Israel's severe restrictions on aid into war-ravaged Gaza and its ongoing hostilities could mean it is using starvation as a "weapon of war".

"The extent of Israel's continued restrictions on entry of aid into Gaza, together with the manner in which he continues to conduct hostilities may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime," U.N. rights office spokesman Jeremy Laurence told reporters in Geneva, adding that the final determination of whether "starvation is being used as a weapon of war" would be determined by a court of law.