Israel-Iran latest: Nine killed in Beirut strike as Israel vows ‘very strong’ response to Iran missile attack

Israel’s strike on a building in the Bachoura district near the Lebanese parliament makes it the closest air assault they have launched to the city’s central downtown district.

A photo circulating on Lebanese WhatsApp groups, which has not yet been verified, showed a heavily damaged building with its first floor on fire.

“Another sleepless night in Beirut. Counting the blasts shaking the city. No warning sirens. Not knowing what’s next. Only that uncertainty lies ahead. Anxiety and fear are omnipresent,” UN special coordinator in Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said on X on Thursday.

The late afternoon Emirates flight from London Heathrow to Dubai has an advertised connection to Bangkok of just one hour. Normally 60 minutes is sufficient for extricating passengers (and, separately, their checked baggage) from the world’s biggest passenger plane, the A380, and enabling them to board another SuperJumbo at a different gate at the airport that handles more international travellers than any in the world, all in the early hours of the morning.

But the remarkable, unrelenting choreography that allows millions of passengers to connect every day at Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi and many other hubs is under severe strain as a result of the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Lebanon.

Read the full article here:

Ministers from Gulf Arab states and Iran attending a meeting of Asian nations hosted by Qatar have discussed de-escalation in the conflict between Israel and Iran, three sources told Reuters on Thursday.

The Gulf Arab states sought to reassure Iran of their neutrality in the conflict on the back of concerns that a wider escalation in violence could threaten Gulf oil facilities, two of the sources said.

Fears are rising of an all-out war across the Middle East in the wake of lran launching almost 200 ballistic missiles in an attack on Israel, marking a major escalation in the conflict between the two bitter enemies.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said the missiles were launched in response to Israeli military troops military campaign against the Tehran-backed Hezbollah, including a ground invasion into Lebanon..

On 17 September, a series of exploding device attacks saw Hezbollah walkie talkies and pagers detonate, injuring more than 2,300 people and leading to a major escalation between the two countries.

Read the full article here:

A total of 1,974 people, including 127 children, have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon in the last year, the Lebanese health minister has said.

Some 9,384 have been injured, Firass Abiad added.

Lebanon’s transport minister Ali Hamieh said on Thursday has said that all border crossings were under government monitoring.

This follows Israeli accusations that Hezbollah was smuggling weapons from Syria through the Masnaa border crossing.

The Israeli military has ordered the evacuation of villages and towns in southern Lebanon that are north of a United Nations-declared buffer zone established after the 2006 war.

The warnings issued on Thursday signalled a possible broadening of Israel’s incursion, which until now has been confined to areas close to the border.

Israel has told people to leave Nabatieh, a provincial capital, and other communities north of the Litani River. This area formed the northern edge of the border zone established by the UN Security Council after the 2006 war.

Just after the warning, the Lebanese Red Cross said an Israeli strike wounded four of its paramedics and killed a Lebanese army soldier as they were evacuating wounded people from the south.

It says the convoy near the village of Taybeh, which was accompanied by Lebanese troops, was targeted on Thursday despite co-ordinating its movements with UN peacekeepers.

Israel has killed Abdel-Aziz Salha, a West Bank Hamas militant who had been jailed for life for taking part in the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah in 2000 but later deported to Gaza in a prisoner swap, Hamas media and medics said.

Salha was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a tent inside Al-Aklouk School, which shelters displaced Palestinians, in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip earlier on Thursday, medics said.

There was no immediate Israeli comment on Salha’s death or whether he had been deliberately targeted.

Militant group Hezbollah says it has detonated a bomb against Israeli forces infiltrating a southern Lebanese village.