Middle East & North Africa

BEIRUT, Nov 3 (Reuters) - The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah warned the United States on Friday that preventing a regional war depended on stopping the Israeli attack on Gaza, and there was a realistic possibility of fighting on the Lebanese front turning into a "wide war".

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in his first speech since the Israel-Hamas war erupted on Oct. 7, also threatened Israel's main ally the United States, hinting his Iran-backed group was ready to confront U.S. warships in the Mediterranean.

GAZA, Nov. 3 (Xinhua) -- An Israeli raid targeted a tower housing several media offices in Gaza City on Friday, according to Palestinian security sources.

The Israeli bombing targeted the Hajji Tower, west of Gaza City, which housed offices of local, Arab and international media, said the sources who asked to remain anonymous.

In the morning, dozens of Palestinian journalists mourned Palestine TV correspondent Muhammad Abu Hatab and his family members, who were killed in their home by an Israeli raid last night in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis.

TEHRAN, Nov. 3 (Xinhua) -- At least 32 people were killed and 17 others injured on Friday in a fire in the northern Iranian province of Gilan, the Iranian Students' News Agency (ISNA) reported.

The fire erupted in the early morning hours at a rehabilitation center in Langarud County, ISNA quoted Deputy Governor of Gilan for Political, Security and Social Affairs Mohammad Jalaei as saying.

He noted that four of the injured were intubated, and the rest were in better condition, putting the center's capacity for patients at 40.

ANKARA, Nov. 3 (Xinhua) -- Turkish security forces seized 1.1 tons of drugs in anti-narcotic operations across 44 provinces, the country's Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said Friday.

A total of 176 suspects were detained in the operations involving 387 teams, 985 police officers, two aircraft, and 27 narcotic detection dogs, Yerlikaya said on social media X.

The police seized 846 kg of methamphetamine, 223 kg of skunk, 11 kg of cocaine, 15 kg of marijuana, five kg of bonzai, 0.5 kg of heroin, 35,000 narcotic pills, 14 pistols, four rifles, and a large amount of money.

A growing list of Israeli officials have accepted responsibility for failing to prevent Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli communities during the Oct. 7 incursion that triggered the current Israel-Hamas war. Conspicuously absent from that roll call is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday to press for a humanitarian pause in the fighting with Hamas, as Israeli troops tightened their encirclement of Gaza City.

Tensions escalated along the northern border with Lebanon ahead of a speech planned later Friday by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Hamas ally. It is his first public speech since Hamas attacked Israel last month, stoking fears the conflict could become a regional one.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A Dubai-based television network broadcasting across the Mideast cut substantial portions of an episode of the satiric news program “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” over references to Saudi Arabia’s crown prince being implicated in the 2018 killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

BUREIJ REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip (AP) — The gray film covering the faces of children rushed to Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza Thursday made it hard to distinguish between the living and the dead.

After two Israeli airstrikes flattened an entire block of apartment buildings in the Bureij refugee camp and damaged two U.N. schools-turned-shelters, rubble-covered Palestinians big and small arrived at a hospital too packed to take them.

JERUSALEM, Nov 1 (Reuters) - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu built his reputation as a security hawk on the back of his service in an elite special forces unit that carried out some of Israel's most daring hostage rescues.

His legacy as his country's longest serving leader will now be shaped by one of the worst security failures it has known and by the fate of more than 200 hostages seized by Palestinian Hamas gunmen from Gaza who Israel says killed 1,400 people on the deadliest day of its 75-year-old history.

QUSRA, West Bank, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Mourning his father and brother, Mohammed Wadi says armed Israeli settlers from outposts overlooking his olive-growing West Bank village no longer aim low when they shoot at Palestinian neighbours. "Now, they shoot to kill," he said.

Violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, already at a more than 15-year high this year, surged further after Israel hurtled into a new war in the separate enclave of Gaza in response to Palestinian militant group Hamas unleashing the deadliest day in Israel's history on Oct. 7.