A senior UN official warned that Israel's continued military presence and air strikes in Syria threaten the country's fragile political transition.

"There have been hundreds of reported Israeli air strikes across Syria since 8 December of last year, in the southwest, the Syrian coast, northeastern Syria, Damascus, Hama, and Homs," Khaled Khiari, UN assistant secretary-general for the Middle East and Asia and the Pacific, told the UN Security Council, referring to the day that Syria’s former Assad regime ended.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Ankara will continue to work with Indonesia on the reconstruction of Gaza and defending the Palestinian cause.

Erdogan's remarks came during a joint news conference with his Indonesian counterpart Prabowo Subianto in the capital Ankara.

An Israeli military official said that reserve pilots who publicly called for securing the release of hostages, even at the cost of ending the Gaza war, would be dismissed from the air force.

"With the full backing of the chief of the General Staff, the commander of the IAF (Israeli air force) has decided that any active reservist who signed the letter will not be able to continue serving in the IDF (military)," the official told AFP in response to a letter signed by around 1,000 reserve and retired pilots.

The Israeli army claimed to have assassinated a Hamas commander in Gaza City, as Israel continued its destructive onslaught on the Palestinian enclave.

A military statement said that Haitham Razek Khalil was killed, along with other Hamas members, in a “precise strike” in Gaza City on Wednesday. The army claimed that Khalil was the commander of what it called Hamas’ Shujaiya Battalion and was responsible for a spate of attacks against Israeli forces in Gaza.

After nearly nine and a half years in detention, Israel released Palestinian prisoner Ahmed Manasra, who was detained when he was just 13 years old.

“Manasra served nine and a half years of torment, pain, and hardships in Israeli prisons,” his lawyer Khaled Zabarqa told Anadolu Agency.

Zabarqa noted that Israeli prison authorities freed Manasra “away from the prison to prevent his family from receiving him, leaving him alone in an empty area.”

The director-general of the World Health Organization called for the "urgent lifting" of the aid blockade, protection of health care and humanitarian access in Gaza, warning the siege increases the risk of disease and death.

Speaking at a news conference in Geneva, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said 75 percent of UN missions within Gaza had been denied or impeded last week.

Calling for the lifting of the aid blockade immediately, he said ensuring the protection of health care and humanitarian access across the enclave is a must.

The Israeli army demolished five more Palestinian homes in the West Bank amid ongoing military escalation in the occupied territory.

According to witnesses, army forces, escorted by bulldozers, raided the town of al-Rihiya, south of Hebron city in the southern West Bank, and razed three homes there for the alleged lack of building permits.

The Israeli army also issued demolition orders for 20 other homes in the same town, witnesses said.

The Palestinian group Hamas welcomed resolutions issued by the UN cultural agency UNESCO demanding Israel halt its settlement building in occupied East Jerusalem and Hebron in the West Bank.

On Wednesday, UNESCO’s Executive Board unanimously adopted two resolutions calling for halting excavation projects and construction activities in East Jerusalem, including its Old City and surrounding areas, as well as at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in the southern West Bank.

In a statement, Hamas said these UN resolutions “expose and criminalize the violations of the fascist (Israeli) occupation government against the Palestinian land and its holy sites.”

The legal filing says Hamas has never extended its military operations outside the territory of historic Palestine, even though the governments of Britain and the US have provided “significant levels of support” to the Zionist State.

Palestine has welcomed France’s plan to recognise a Palestinian state in June.

A Foreign Ministry statement called the French plan “a step in the right direction to protect the two-state solution and achieve peace”.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday that Paris is making plans to recognise a Palestinian state and could do so as early as June.