The World Health Organization said four children were among six people injured in a strike on a polio vaccination center in northern Gaza, where UN agencies spoke of “apocalyptic” conditions in the face of an Israeli assault.

Days before the presidential election in the United States — Israel’s main military supplier — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran’s response would cover attacks on both the Islamic republic and its allies.

“The enemies, both the US and the Zionist regime, should know that they will certainly receive a heartbreaking response,” Khamenei said, referring to Iran-aligned groups, including those in Yemen and Syria.

On October 26, Israel bombed military sites in Iran, killing four soldiers, in response to a barrage of about 200 rockets on October 1 that Tehran called retaliation.

Israel warned Iran not to respond to the October 26 attack.

Analysts say Israel has inflicted serious damage on Iran’s air defenses and missile capabilities and may yet launch larger-scale actions against the Islamic republic.

The US military said on Saturday that its B-52 bombers had arrived in the Middle East, a day after Washington announced their deployment in a warning to Tehran.

– Gaza’s ‘Darkest Times’ –

Since late September, Israel has been engaged in a full-scale war against Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, while fighting continues against the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which started the Gaza war by attacking Israel on October 7. last.

Israeli forces have carried out a major air and ground assault since October 6 in northern Gaza, centered on the Jabalia area, vowing to stop the regrouping of Hamas.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency had received “an extremely worrying report” of a strike on the Sheikh Radwan health center.

The facility “was hit today while parents were bringing their children to the polio vaccination facility,” he said.

Tedros did not say who carried out the strike, but a source in Gaza’s civil defense agency told AFP it was “an Israeli quadcopter that fired two missiles that hit the wall of the Sheikh Radwan clinic”.

The Israeli military denied striking near the clinic at the time.

The UN children’s agency said “the attacks on Jabalia, the vaccination clinic and the UNICEF staff member are yet further examples of the serious consequences of indiscriminate strikes on civilians in the Gaza Strip.”

UNICEF chief Catherine Russell said 50 children had been killed in 48 hours in Jabalia.

“Taken alongside the horrific level of child deaths in northern Gaza from other attacks, these latest events combine to write yet another dark chapter in one of the darkest periods of this terrible war,” she said in -a statement from Saturday.

The Israeli military said dozens of militants were killed around Jabalia “in aerial and ground activities”.

Two rockets were fired into Israel from the area on Saturday, the military said, the first such attack in weeks.

Doctors and Gaza’s civil protection agency reported that three people died in a strike on Nuseirat in central Gaza.

“We came out and there were planes and gunfire above us,” said Ashraf Abdullah, describing the victims as “all torn to pieces.”

The October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel killed 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.

Israel’s military campaign of revenge has killed 43,314 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-ruled territory’s Ministry of Health, which the UN considers reliable.

The Israeli military said two soldiers were killed in Gaza on Saturday, bringing the number of casualties to 370 since the ground offensive began on October 27 last year.

– No heating, warm clothes –

After nearly a year of tit-for-tat exchanges across Israel’s northern border, Israel escalated its bombing campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon on September 23 and subsequently sent ground troops.

Since then, Hezbollah has pulled deeper into Israel.

On Friday, Israeli naval commandos captured a trainee sailor whom a military official described as a “top operative” of Hezbollah in a raid in northern Lebanon and brought him to Israel.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati has instructed the foreign ministry to lodge a complaint with the UN Security Council about the raid in the coastal city of Batroun, his office said.

The Lebanese army and the UN peacekeeping force UNIFIL are both conducting investigations into the raid, Mikati’s office said, adding that he called for “swift” results.

Lebanon’s National News Agency said an “unidentified military force” carried out a “sea landing” on the shores of the city of Batroun at dawn on Friday.

An acquaintance of the abductee identified him as a student at the city’s Institute of Maritime Sciences and Technology (MARSATI), the main training college for the naval industry in Lebanon.

Israel’s wider strikes in Lebanon have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

“There is no heating. We have no warm clothes,” said Fatima, 17, who is now camping with her family at a school near Deir al-Ahmar in the Baalbek area of ​​eastern Lebanon.

Bombing has killed at least 1,930 people in Lebanon since the war escalated, according to an AFP tally of Health Ministry figures.

The Israeli military says 38 soldiers have been killed in Lebanon since it began ground operations on September 30.

Israeli strikes against the Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut on Saturday killed one person and wounded 15, the Health Ministry said.

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