Israel-Iran War HIGHLIGHTS: Biden says US discussing Israeli strikes on Iranian oil facilities

European shares declined on Thursday as investors remained wary of risk-taking amid elevated geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. Most sectors logged declines except energy giants.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov held a meeting with the Israeli envoy to Moscow Simona Halperin on Thursday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

Ratings agencies S&P Global and Moody’s have both downgraded Israel’s credit score over the last week and on Thursday S&P also warned that the upsurge in fighting has “severely weakened the recovery prospects of Lebanon's already fragile economy and political landscape”.

Oxford Economics says the odds of a wider regional war have now risen. It anticipates a 0.4 percentage point hit to global GDP growth in 2025 as oil prices spike to $130 due to disrupted supply should a full-fledged war scenario materialise.

The Israeli army said it intercepted a drone in southern Israel, and no injuries were reported. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq said it attacked a target in Israel.

Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah group said on Thursday it targeted Israel's "Sakhnin base" for military industries in Haifa Bay with a salvo of rockets.

The Israeli Air Force said it attacked targets of the intelligence headquarters of the terrorist organization Hezbollah in Beirut, including: the unit's operatives, collection means, headquarters and other infrastructure. 

Germany and Austria's ambassadors in Tehran were summoned on Thursday after Berlin and Vienna summoned Iran's representatives to protest Iran's attack on Israel, Iranian state media reported.

A 21-year-old woman kidnapped by Islamic State militants in Iraq more than a decade ago was freed from Gaza this week in an operation led by the United States and involving Jordan and the Baghdad government, Iraqi and US officials said.

The Lebanese army says that a soldier was killed in an Israeli strike on a military post in southern Lebanon, adding that soldiers fired back at the source of the fire. It is the first time the army has fired back at Israeli forces since the conflict began a year ago, a Lebanese security source tells Reuters.

The Israel Defence Forces said it eliminated Aziz Salha, who took part in the brutal lynching of Sergeant First Class (Res.) Yosef Avrahami and Corporal (Res.) Vadim Norzhich in Ramallah in 2000, in the Deir El Balah area in central Gaza.

The explosive device detonated by Hezbollah in a unit of the Golani Brigade in Maroun al-Ras killed 4 soldiers and wounded others, according to Israeli media.

Emirates cancels all flights to and from Iraq, Iran and Jordan on October 4 and 5 due to tension in the region

Spain’s defense ministry says its two planes sent to Beirut to evacuate Spanish civilians have taken off and are heading to an airbase near Madrid. Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles said that between 400 and 500 of the around 1,000 Spaniards registered as living in Lebanon are being airlifted out.

Belgium’s VTM broadcaster says that one of its television reporters and a cameraman have been attacked in central Beirut while reporting on the war between Israel and Hezbollah.

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

Iran responded to the G7 condemnation of its attack on Israel by saying it is "biased and irresponsible", Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said in a statement on Thursday.

A consultant working for Iran's Revolutionary Guards has died from injuries sustained in an Israeli air attack on the Syrian capital Damascus on Monday, according to media reports.

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.

Lebanese soldier killed, four paramedics wounded in Israeli strike while evacuating wounded in the south, according to officials.

An Israeli airstrike on an apartment in central Beirut killed seven Hezbollah-affiliated civilian first responders. Israel has been pounding areas of the country where the militant group has a strong presence since late September, but was rarely struck at the heart of the capital.

 The Israeli military said Thursday that it killed a senior Hamas leader in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip around three months ago. It said that a strike on an underground compound in northern Gaza killed Rawhi Mushtaha and two other Hamas commanders.

On a warm spring night in Athens, shortly before midnight, a senior executive at a Greek shipping company noticed an unusual email had landed in his personal inbox.
The message, which was also sent to the manager's business email address, warned that one of the company's vessels traveling through the Red Sea was at risk of being attacked by Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthi militia.
The Greek-managed ship had violated a Houthi-imposed transit ban by docking at an Israeli port and would be "directly targeted by the Yemeni Armed Forces in any area they deem appropriate," read the message, written in English and reviewed by Reuters.

Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani said on Thursday that what is happening in Gaza a "collective genocide" – turning Gaza into an uninhabitable place – and that his country has always warned of Israel's "impunity." He also called for serious cease-fire efforts to stop Israel's "aggression" against Lebanon and added that no peace is possible in the region without establishing a Palestinian state.

 Flights have resumed in Iran since Thursday morning, state media reported the country's Civil Aviation Organisation as saying, after restrictions were imposed on Tuesday when Tehran launched missiles at Israel.

Khamenei's invitation to Nasrallah to relocate to Iran came after thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah blew up in deadly attacks on Sept 17 and 18, the first official said. The attacks have been widely attributed to Israel, although it has not officially claimed responsibility. Nasrallah, however, was confident in his security and trusted his inner circle completely, the official said, despite Tehran's serious concerns about potential infiltrators within Hezbollah's ranks.

Khamenei tried a second time, relaying another message through Nilforoushan to Nasrallah last week, imploring him to leave Lebanon and relocate to Iran as a safer location. But Nasrallah insisted on staying in Lebanon, the official said. Several high-level meetings were held in Tehran following the pager blasts to discuss Hezbollah and Nasrallah's safety, the official said, but declined to say who attended those meetings.

In a statement, the Houthis said they “carried out a military operation targeting a vital target in the Jaffa (Tel Aviv) area in occupied Palestine with a number of Jaffa drones.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to flee Lebanon days before he was killed in an Israeli strike and is now deeply worried about Israeli infiltration of senior government ranks in Tehran, three Iranian sources said.

China called on the United Nations Security Council to take "urgent actions" to de-escalate the situation in the Middle East as Israel launched fresh air strikes in Lebanon. China's permanent representative to the U.N., Fu Cong, said during a Security Council briefing on Wednesday, that it needed to make clear and unequivocal demands to stop the cycle of violence over the Israeli-Lebanon conflict.

"The Security Council bears the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security," the official Xinhua news agency reported Fu as saying, noting that all parties concerned "must return to the track of political and diplomatic solutions".

The Israeli army said sirens that sounded early on Thursday in the community of Nahal Oz near the Gaza strip were determined to be due to a "false identification". It did not provide further details.

United Nations General Secretary António Guterres condemned Iran’s Missile attack on Israel and said, "Millions of people across Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory were forced to seek shelter. One person was killed during the Iranian strikes, a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank. 

The United Nations on Wednesday called Israel’s ban on Secretary-General Antonio Guterres entering the country a political statement by its foreign minister and stressed that the world body’s contacts with Israel will continue “because they have to.” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz deeming the U.N. chief “persona non grata” is also “one more attack on the United Nations staff that we’ve seen from the government of Israel.”

Israel’s accusations of U.N. bias and antisemitism date back decades, but the rift has intensified since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks in the country’s south killed about 1,200 people and launched the war in Gaza. Israel’s offensive against the militant group has killed over 41,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters but that a little more than half were women and children.

An American from Dearborn, Michigan, was killed in Lebanon in an Israeli airstrike, according to the man's daughter, friend and the US congresswoman representing his constituency. On Wednesday, Democratic US Representative Rashida Tlaib's office said it was in touch with Kamel Ahmad Jawad's family, adding he was the Palestinian American congresswoman's constituent and a US citizen.

His daughter, Nadine Jawad, said in a statement that her father was killed in an Israeli strike in Lebanon on Tuesday "while trying to save innocent lives." She added that in his final days, her father chose to stay near a hospital to help the elderly and the disabled.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned Hezbollah leader Syyed Hassan Nasrallah to flee Lebanon days before he was killed in an Israeli strike and is now deeply worried about Israeli infiltration of senior government ranks in Tehran, three Iranian sources said. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Hezbollah's booby-trapped pagers on Sept. 17, Khamenei sent a message with an envoy to beseech the Hezbollah secretary general to leave for Iran, citing intelligence reports that suggested Israel had operatives within Hezbollah and was planning to kill him, one of the sources, a senior Iranian official, told Reuters.

More than 1,900 people have been killed and over 9,000 wounded in Lebanon in almost a year of cross-border fighting, with most of the deaths occurring in the past two weeks, according to Lebanese government statistics.

More than 1,900 people have been killed and over 9,000 wounded in Lebanon in almost a year of cross-border fighting, with most of the deaths occurring in the past two weeks, according to Lebanese government statistics.

Warning sirens are activated in Bat Yam due to what the IDF says is a suspected hostile aircraft, with the Home Front Command instructing residents of the coastal city just south of Tel Aviv to take shelter in protected areas, Times of Israel reported.

Biden joined a call with Group of Seven major power leaders on Wednesday to coordinate a response, including new sanctions against Tehran, the White House said. G7 leaders voiced "strong concern" over the Middle East crisis but said a diplomatic solution was still viable and a region-wide conflict was in no one's interest, a statement said.

US President Joe Biden said he would not support any Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear sites in response to its ballistic missile attack and urged Israel to act "proportionally" against its regional arch-foe. Biden joined a call with Group of Seven major power leaders on Wednesday to coordinate a response, including new sanctions against Tehran, the White House said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a condolence video, said: "We are at the height of a difficult war against Iran's Axis of Evil, which wants to destroy us. "This will not happen because we will stand together and with God's help, we will win together," he said.

Israel bombed central Beirut in the early hours of Thursday, killing at least six people, after its forces suffered their deadliest day on the Lebanese front in a year of clashes against the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah. Israel said it conducted a precise air strike on Beirut. Reuters witnesses reported hearing a massive blast, and a security source said it targeted a building in central Beirut's Bachoura neighbourhood close to parliament, the nearest Israeli strikes have come to Lebanon's seat of government.

At least three explosions shook Beirut’s southern suburbs twenty minutes before midnight. Thick smoke quickly obscured the lights on the mountains above, drifting across the heart of the city. Another night of air strikes has begun, CNN reported.