Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group said it had fired waves of rockets and drones at the Israeli army on Thursday after an Israeli strike killed one of its senior commanders.
The major attack comes after months of near-daily cross-border fire between the group and the Israeli military since Hezbollah ally Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war.
From misting systems to heat-reflective road coverings, Saudi officials are trying to aid hajj pilgrims in coping with heat, but scientists caution that climate change may outpace these efforts.
The annual pilgrimage, one of the world's largest religious gatherings, coincides again this year with the hot Saudi summer, with officials predicting average highs of 44 degrees Celsius (111 Fahrenheit).
Travelling to Mecca from Chicago in the United States, Shariq Memon prepared for the worst, though he told AFP conditions had been manageable so far.
Most of the victims in a deadly blaze that engulfed a block housing immigrant workers were from India, Kuwait's foreign minister said on Thursday, raising the death toll to 50.
Three Filipinos were among the dead, Philippines officials said, after the fire sent black smoke billowing through the six-storey building south of Kuwait City.
Most of oil-rich Kuwait's four million-plus population is made up of foreigners, many of them from South and Southeast Asia working in construction and service industries.
Frenchman Louis Arnaud returned to Paris on Thursday after his release from a more than 20-month prison ordeal in Iran, but a dozen Europeans are still detained in the Islamic republic.
Activists and some Western governments, including France, accuse Iran of exercising a strategy of taking foreign nationals as hostages to force concessions from the West.
Israeli helicopters struck Rafah on Thursday, residents said, with militants reporting street battles in the southern Gazan city as US President Joe Biden called Hamas the "biggest hang-up" to another truce.
Tensions were also soaring on Israel's northern border, with more attacks by Hamas ally Hezbollah targeting military positions and a civilian reported killed in an Israeli strike in Lebanon.
A massive fire at an oil refinery in Iraqi Kurdistan raged for about 20 hours and injured at least 14 firefighters who on Thursday finally brought the blaze under control.
The fire broke out in a major crude oil tank on Wednesday night before spreading to a second refinery on a road southwest of Arbil, capital of the autonomous northern region of Kurdistan, the civil defence agency said.
Thick plumes of black smoke and balls of orange flame rose into the sky above the facility, an AFP photographer reported.
French citizen Louis Arnaud returned to Paris Thursday after being held in Iran since September 2022 and sentenced last year to five years in jail on national security charges.
Emerging from a small plane at Le Bourget airport outside Paris, a visibly tired but smiling Arnaud shook hands with Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne before embracing his parents, according to images aired on television.
Arnaud linked arms with his relatives as they entered a private room at the airport out of view of the cameras.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, on an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, said he discussed preparations for a peace summit this weekend with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Zelensky landed in the Red Sea city of Jeddah for his latest trip to the Gulf kingdom, which has sought to stay neutral in Ukraine's war with Russia.
In a post on social media, he said he held an "energetic meeting" with the Saudi de facto ruler.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken vowed Wednesday to work to seal a Gaza ceasefire agreement, saying not all Hamas demands were acceptable but voicing hope gaps could be closed.
Consulting with key mediator Qatar on the Hamas response to the plan outlined by US President Joe Biden, Blinken said the Palestinian group could have given a "clear and simple yes" but voiced guarded hope for moving forward.
"We believe that some of the requested changes are workable and some are not," Blinken told reporters in Doha.
It is Islam's holiest pilgrimage, but the hajj to Mecca in Saudi Arabia has in recent decades been plagued by deadly disasters, from stampedes to militant attacks.
Yet the last time the pilgrimage was cancelled outright was in 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt.
The coronavirus pandemic did, however, force the kingdom to radically downscale the 2020 event, allowing just a few thousand people to participate, a far cry from the 2.5 million believers who did so in 2019.
