Israel-Lebanon latest: Israel denies being behind pager attack as over 300 rockets fired over border

Iran’s supreme leader has said that Israel is committing “shamless crimes” against children, not combatants.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was speaking on state TV from Tehran, where he told a group of envoys from Muslim countries that Israel is not “fighting men, but ordinary people”.

“Unable to hurt the real fighters in Palestine, they are venting their malicious anger on small children, on hospital patients, and on schools filled with young children,” he said.

Palestinians said an Israeli strike killed at least 22 people in a school sheltering displaced people in southern Gaza City on Saturday, while the Israeli military said the attack targeted a command centre of militant group Hamas.

The Gaza health ministry said most of those killed were women and children. The Hamas-run government media office said 13 children and six women were among the dead.

The military said it hit a Hamas command centre embedded in the compound that previously served as a school, repeating an accusation that the group uses civilian facilities for military purposes. Hamas denies that.

Reuters footage from the site showed blasted walls, wrecked and burnt furniture, and holes in the ceiling of one room as people tried to salvage what they could of belongings.

“The women and their children were sitting in the playground of the school, the kids were playing, and suddenly two rockets hit them,” said one witness Said Al-Malahi.

Cyprus’s president called for restraint over escalating tensions in the Middle East in separate telephone conversations with the Lebanese and Israeli prime ministers on Saturday, his spokesperson said in a statement.

The east Mediterranean island is the closest European Union member state to the Middle East, and has good relations with both Lebanon and Israel. Cyprus was ready to act as a conduit for diplomacy as well as facilitate contacts between the sides, said spokesperson Konstantinos Letymbiotis.