Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez met with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa and leading officials from several Middle Eastern countries in Madrid on Wednesday after Spain, Ireland and Norway recognized a Palestinian state.

The diplomatic move by the three western European nations on Tuesday was slammed by Israel and will have little immediate impact on its grinding war in Gaza, but it was a victory for the Palestinians and could encourage other Western powers to follow suit.

Algeria is circulating a proposed U.N. Security Council resolution that would demand an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and order Israel to halt its military offensive in the southern city of Rafah immediately.

The draft resolution, obtained Wednesday evening by The Associated Press, also demands that the cease-fire be respected by all parties. It also calls for the immediate release of all hostages taken during Hamas' attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

After the International Criminal Court's top prosecutor sought arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his defense minister and top Hamas officials, the Israeli leader accused him of being one of "the great antisemites in modern times."

As protests roiled college campuses across the United States over the Gaza war, Netanyahu said they were awash with "antisemitic mobs."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday hit out at the United Nations after the latest deadly Israeli strikes in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

"The U.N. cannot even protect its own staff. What are you waiting for to act? The spirit of the United Nations is dead in Gaza," Erdogan told lawmakers from his AKP party.

A five-year-old child from Gaza has landed safely in Beirut days ago to receive medical treatment at the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC).

The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund (GASCF), in collaboration with the Palestine Children's Relief Fund (PCRF), transported the child who suffers from an injury in his upper limb to Lebanon to receive medical care.

Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad released a video on Tuesday showing an Israeli captive alive and held in the Gaza Strip.

The captive, identified by Israeli media as Sasha Trupanov, 28, is seen speaking in Hebrew in the 30-second clip.

U.S. President Joe Biden has no plans to change his Israel policy following a deadly weekend strike on Gaza's Rafah -- but is not turning a "blind eye" to the plight of Palestinian civilians, the White House said Tuesday.

Gazan health authorities said 45 people were killed as a blaze tore through a camp for displaced people following the Sunday strike by Israel.

Israeli shelling and airstrikes killed at least 37 people, most of them sheltering in tents, outside the southern Gaza city of Rafah overnight and on Tuesday — pummeling the same area where strikes triggered a deadly fire days earlier in a camp for displaced Palestinians — according to witnesses, emergency workers and hospital officials.

The tent camp inferno has drawn widespread international outrage, including from some of Israel's closest allies, over the military's expanding offensive into Rafah. And in a sign of Israel's growing isolation on the world stage, Spain, Norway and Ireland formally recognized a Palestinian state on Tuesday.

Israeli tanks penetrated the heart of Rafah on Tuesday despite global outrage over a strike that set ablaze a crowded camp in Gaza's far-southern city, killing 45 people according to Palestinian officials.

The former head of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, allegedly threatened a chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation, the Guardian has revealed.

Cohen’s covert contacts with the ICC’s then-prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, took place in the years leading up to her decision to open a formal investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in occupied Palestinian territories.