The UN General Assembly, the high point of the international diplomatic calendar, comes after Lebanese authorities said Israeli strikes had killed 558 people -- 50 of them children.

Qatar Airways, the national flag-carrier which operates two flights a day to the Lebanese capital, cancelled services on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Israel's military said it hit dozens of Hezbollah targets overnight, a day after carrying out airstrikes against the armed group which Lebanese authorities said killed nearly 500 people and sent tens of thousands fleeing for safety. 

"I can say we are almost in a full-fledged war," Borrell said ahead of a gathering of world leaders at the United Nations.

Hezbollah rocket fire reached Kiryat Bialik near north Israel's largest city Haifa, leaving a building in flames, another pockmarked with shrapnel and vehicles incinerated.

"Due to the unpredictable nature of ongoing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel and recent explosions throughout Lebanon, including Beirut, the US Embassy urges US citizens to depart Lebanon while commercial options still remain available," the State Department said in an updated advisory.

Lebanese group Hezbollah has exchanged regular fire with Israeli forces throughout the Gaza war, but the cross-border violence has intensified in recent days.

Ibrahim Aqil, who was wanted by the United States for involvement in the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut, headed the Iran-backed militant group's elite Radwan Force.

Hundreds have been killed in Lebanon, most of them fighters, and dozens in Israel, including soldiers.

“The resolution supports the [International Court of Justice (ICJ)] advisory opinion that deemed Israel’s continued, prolonged and illegal occupation of Palestine unlawful,” the Foreign Ministry wrote in a statement on Thursday.

The newspaper cited top-level officials in the White House, State Department and Pentagon without naming them. Those bodies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Taiwan-based Gold Apollo said this week it did not manufacture the devices used in the attack, and that Budapest-based company BAC to which the pagers were traced has a license to use its brand.

The US airline joins a host of other airlines that have cancelled or suspended flights in recent days to cities in the region including Beirut and Tehran, as fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has intensified along Israel's northern border with Lebanon. 

In the second wave of device explosions in as many days, 20 people died and more than 450 were wounded on Wednesday in Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, officials said.

The sophisticated attacks on communications equipment used by Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah have sown disarray in Lebanon, and are increasingly viewed as heralding a return to all-out war, last fought 18 years ago.

Not formally declared as a war, the exchanges of fire between Israeli troops and Hezbollah have killed hundreds of mostly fighters in Lebanon, and dozens of people on the Israeli side.

The Iran-backed Hezbollah has traded near-daily cross-border fire with Israeli forces since Palestinian militants attacked Israel on October 7, sparking the war in Gaza.

Tehran's ambassador in Beirut was wounded but his injuries were not serious, Iranian state media reported.

"Due to limited access to laboratory testing in remote areas, only about 40 percent of all suspected cases have been tested in 2024 [up from nine percent in 2023], and among these, around 55 percent tested positive," the WHO says.

The Foreign Ministry has repatriated an Indonesian citizen who was named a suspect in a murder case in Saudi Arabia to her family in Jember, East Java, the ministry announced in a statement on Thursday.

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, who is also a Turkish national, was shot dead last Friday at a protest march in Beita, a village near Nablus where Palestinians have been repeatedly attacked by far-right Jewish settlers.

State-owned pharmaceutical company PT Bio Farma received support from the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) on Tuesday for its vaccine collaboration with Senegal’s Pasteur Institute of Dakar (IPD).

Officials from the United States and Turkey, among other countries, says that they are deeply disturbed by the death of Turkish-American, calling on Israel to investigate the incident.

State-owned aircraft maker PT Dirgantara Indonesia (PTDI) signed two agreements on Tuesday to sell and maintain aircraft for customers in Africa on the sidelines of an event linking African countries with Indonesia. 

The world's biggest two-way lender, Beijing showed a desire to move away from funding big-ticket infrastructure and focus instead on selling to developing economies the advanced and green technologies in which Chinese firms have invested heavily.

The 6.8-magnitude quake killed nearly 3,000 people and damaged the homes of over two million people across the High Atlas region.

The campaign, which was hastened after the discovery of the first polio case in a Gazan baby last month, relies on daily eight-hour pauses in fighting between Israel and Hamas militants in specific areas of the besieged enclave.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo called on Monday for unity among the countries of the Global South amid sluggish worldwide progress toward achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), saying before his African counterparts that Indonesia remained committed to furthering its economic cooperation with the continent.

In the evening, tens of thousands of Israelis gathered in the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities to protest the government and call for a hostage release deal.

The scars of ongoing clashes in the occupied Palestinian territory, which began on Wednesday as part of what Israel has described as a counter-terrorism operation, were everywhere: collapsed walls, uprooted trees, tiled roofs covering mounds of rubble.