Region

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Lebanon said six people were killed in Israeli strikes Wednesday on municipality buildings in the southern city of Nabatiyeh, where Heibollah and ally Amal hold sway, with an official saying the mayor was among the dead.

The attacks were among 11 strikes on Nabatiyeh city and its surroundings that created "a kind of belt of fire" in the area, the local official had earlier told AFP.

They prompted a UN call for the protection of civilians, while Lebanon's prime minister said the strikes targeted a meeting of the city's municipal council.

"The Israeli enemy raid... on two buildings, that of the Nabatiyeh municipality and the union of municipalities, killed six people and injured 43," the health ministry said.

It added that the death toll was preliminary and that rescuers were still searching for survivors under the rubble.

"The mayor of Nabatiyeh, among others... was martyred. It's a massacre," Nabatiyeh governor Howaida Turk told AFP.

She added that the mayor, Ahmad Kahil, had been in the municipality building with his team during a daily crisis management meeting.

The Israeli army said its forces hit "dozens of Hizbollah terrorist targets in the Nabatiyeh area and dismantled underground infrastructure used by Hezbollah's Radwan Forces in southern Lebanon".

Hizbollah-affiliated rescuers said the strikes destroyed the municipality building and a nearby medical facility, with two doctors among the dead.

The Lebanese civil defence said the strikes killed one of its staff members who was at the municipality building with colleagues.

Lebanon's official National News Agency said the Nabatiyeh strikes also hit a library and shopping centre. 

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati condemned the strikes, which he said "deliberately targeted a meeting of the municipal council that was discussing the city's services and relief situation".

The UN special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said "civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected at all times."

AFP footage showed several plumes of grey smoke rising from Nabatiyeh, following the consecutive strikes.

On Saturday, Israeli strikes razed the city's main marketplace and wounded eight people, the health ministry had said.

At least 1,356 people have been killed in Lebanon since Israel launched an intense air campaign on September 23, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real toll is likely higher.

The escalation followed nearly a year of cross-border fire between Hezbollah and Israeli troops over the Gaza war.

Meanwhile, EU nations with peacekeepers in Lebanon Wednesday expressed "the shared will to exert maximum political and diplomatic pressure on Israel" to prevent further "incidents" against the UN mission, Italy said.

Italy and France organised a video conference among the 16 EU countries that participate in UNIFIL, where the defence ministers "strongly condemned" attacks the mission has blamed on Israel, the Italian defence ministry said in a statement.

It said it called the meeting -- one day before an EU summit opens in Brussels -- to seek a joint approach to fire against the peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, as Israel wages a ground offensive against the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

"Another key point that emerged from the meeting was the shared will to exert maximum political and diplomatic pressure on Israel, so that no further incidents occur," it said.

"At the same time, it was made clear that Hezbollah cannot use UNIFIL personnel as a shield in the conflict."

GENEVA — Conflict-ravaged Gaza appears to be facing the worst restrictions on aid since the Israeli war on the Strip began over a year ago, the UN said on Tuesday, lamenting the especially devastating impact on children.

"Day after day, the situation for children becomes worse than the day before," said James Elder, spokesman for the UN children's agency UNICEF.

Vast areas of Gaza have been devastated by Israel's retaliatory assault on the territory after the October 7 Hamas attack last year sparked the war.

And Israel has been intensifying operations in the north of the besieged Palestinian territory, where the UN has warned hundreds of thousands of people are trapped.

Despite a desperate need to increase the amount of aid going in, Elder lamented that aid access was worsening.

"August was the lowest amount of humanitarian aid that came into the Gaza Strip of any full month since the war broke out," he said.

There had been "several days in the last week [where] no commercial trucks whatsoever were allowed to come in," Elder added.

"We see now what is probably the worst restrictions we've seen on humanitarian aid, ever."

Earlier in the year, amid warnings that the UN could declare a full-fledged famine in Gaza, Elder said there had been "a real push to have new routes and access points open".

But now, "we have seen an absolute reversal of that", he warned, adding that since May, "we've seen consistent entry points blocked".

Northern Gaza meanwhile "hasn't had food, any food aid at all coming in all of October", he added.

The dire lack of aid, coupled with the relentless strikes and the fact that around 85 percent of the Gaza Strip has been hit with some form of evacuation order, has made the territory "essentially unlivable", Elder said.

Polio vaccination campaign

Despite escalating Israeli military operations in certain areas, the second round of a polio vaccination campaign for hundreds of thousands of children began on Monday.

The vaccination drive began after the Gaza Strip confirmed its first case of polio in 25 years.

Like the initial round, the second will be divided into three phases, helped by localised "humanitarian pauses" in the fighting: first in central Gaza, then in the south and finally in the hardest-to-reach north of the territory.

 Last week, the UN acknowledged that the second round would be "more complicated" than when the first doses were given last month.

The aim is to provide more than 590,000 children under the age of 10 with a second dose, with nearly 93,000 doses delivered in central Gaza on Monday alone, WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told reporters.

"The vaccination went without major issues yesterday," he said, adding that he hoped the necessary humanitarian pauses would be observed throughout the territory.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Hizbollah said it targeted the north Israeli town of Safed on Tuesday and launched a "big rocket salvo" at a nearby base, more than three weeks into an intense Israeli air campaign on Lebanon.

Fighters launched "a rocket salvo" at Safed, it said and later added it launched a "big salvo of rockets" at a nearby base, saying both attacks were "in defence" of Lebanon and in response to Israeli attacks on the country.

Hizbollah threatened to attack targets across Israel and said it would not be defeated by ongoing intense bombardment of its   strongholds and leadership.

In the latest exchanges during the conflict, the group said it launched a barrage of rockets towards the northern Israeli city of Haifa, while Israel carried out air strikes in several areas of Lebanon.

A defiant Hizbollah "will not be defeated" in its war with Israel, the group's deputy chief Naim Qassem said in a speech.

"Since the Israeli enemy targeted all of Lebanon, we have the right from a defensive position to target any place" in Israel, "whether the centre, the north or the south," he said.

"I am telling the Israeli home front: the solution is a ceasefire," he added.

Iran, which supports Hizbollah, has in recent days engaged in diplomatic talks around establishing a ceasefire in Lebanon and war-battered Gaza amid growing fears of a broader regional conflict.

Lebanon's Prime Minister Najib Mikati told AFP that his country was ready to bolster its military presence in the south after any ceasefire, adding that Israeli troops were making brief cross-border incursions.

Security has been tightened in the country's only airport in Beirut "to remove any pretexts" for an Israeli attack, Mikati added.

Israel has also been intensifying its offensive in the besieged Gaza Strip, which the United Nations warned on Tuesday is suffering under its worst aid restrictions since the war there began over a year ago.

Israel is also weighing how to respond to Iran's decision to launch about 200 missiles at the country on October 1.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said that Israel -- and not its top ally the United States -- would decide how to strike back.

The Iranian barrage was in retaliation for an Israeli strike in Lebanon's Beirut that killed Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian General Abbas Nilforoushan on September 27.

US President Joe Biden -- whose government is Israel's top arms supplier -- has warned Israel against striking Iran's nuclear or oil facilities in order to avoid broader war.

According to a Washington Post report on Monday citing unnamed US officials, Netanyahu reassured the White House that Israel was only contemplating targeting military sites.

Oil prices -- which soared after Iran's attack on Israel -- tumbled by more than five percent following the report.

 A statement from Netanyahu's office on Tuesday took a different tone.

"We listen to the opinions of the United States, but we will make our final decisions based on our national interest," the statement said.

Also on Tuesday, top Iranian commander Esmail Qaani -- whose absence sparked rumours that he could have been killed in an Israeli strike -- appeared in public for the first time in weeks when he attended Nilforoushan's funeral in Tehran.

 'Violent night'

Israel's military launched several strikes in Lebanon on Tuesday, including in the eastern Bekaa Valley where a hospital in Baalbek city was put out of service, Lebanon's official National News Agency reported.

"It was a violent night in Baalbek, we have not witnessed a similar one since" the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbollah, 50-year-old resident Nidal Al Solh told AFP.

An Israeli strike on the northern, Christian-majority village of Aito on Monday is believed to have killed 22 people, including 12 women and two children, according to the UN.

The UN rights office called for a "prompt, independent and thorough investigation" of the strike.

At least 1,315 people have been killed in Lebanon since Israel last month escalated its bombing there, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real toll is likely higher.

The war in Lebanon has displaced at least 690,000 people, according to verified figures last week from the International Organisation for Migration.

 Gaza aid

 Israel says it wants to push back Hizbollah in order to secure its northern boundary and allow tens of thousands of people displaced by rocket fire since last year to return home safely.

Despite a desperate need for more aid in Gaza, particularly in the north, UNICEF spokesman James Elder lamented that the situation was the worst since the tart of Israel's offensive.

"We see now what is probably the worst restrictions we've seen on humanitarian aid, ever," he said, adding that there were "several days in the last week [where] no commercial trucks whatsoever were allowed to come in".

At a school-turned-shelter hit by an Israeli strike in the central Nuseirat camp, Fatima Al Azab said "there is no safety anywhere" in Gaza.

"They are all children, sleeping in the covers, all burned and cut up," she said.

NAIROBI — A landmark multinational agreement on managing the waters of the Nile River has entered into force -- over the vehement objections of Egypt.

The Nile River Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA) took effect on Sunday after more than a decade of negotiations among countries that share the mighty river.

The Nile Basin Initiative -- a partnership of 10 Nile riparian countries based in the Ugandan town of Entebbe -- described the CFA as a "defining moment" in the history of the Nile Basin. 

"[The agreement] is a testament to our collective determination to harness the Nile River for the benefit of all, ensuring its equitable and sustainable use for generations to come," it said in a statement.

But the treaty was signed and ratified by only five Nile nations -- notably Ethiopia -- but not Egypt or Sudan.

The latter two have been locked in a long-running dispute with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a mega hydropower project on the Blue Nile.

Ethiopia considers the $4 billion dam vital to its development and the supply of electricity to its 120 million-strong population.

But Egypt has long viewed it as an existential threat, as the north African country relies on the Nile for 97 per cent of its water needs.

"Egypt will not compromise even a metre of Nile water, and rejects totally the Entebbe agreement," its Irrigation Minister Hani Sewilam said Sunday, according to state-linked media. 

A summit of Nile nations was due to be held in Uganda on October 17 but has been postponed until early next year, Vincent Bagiire, permanent secretary at Uganda's foreign ministry told AFP on Monday.

He declined to give a reason amid speculations it was due to disagreements among member countries.

The Nile Basin Initiative says the CFA aims to "rectify historical imbalances in access to the Nile's waters and ensure that all Nile Basin countries -- whether upstream or downstream -- can benefit from this shared resource".

It said the Nile, which stretches over 11 countries, sustains more than half a billion people. 

The Nile Basin Initiative groups Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda, while Eritrea has the role of observer.