Middle East crisis live: Iran threatens Israel and US with ‘crushing response’ over Israeli attack | Israel

Iran’s supreme leader on Saturday threatened Israel and the US with “a crushing response” over attacks on Iran and its allies, reports the Associated Press (AP).

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke as Iranian officials are increasingly threatening to launch yet another strike against Israel after its 26 October attack that targeted military bases and other locations and killed at least five people.

Any further attacks from either side could engulf the wider Middle East, already teetering over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip and Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon, into a wider regional conflict just head of the US presidential election this Tuesday.

“The enemies, whether the Zionist regime or the United States of America, will definitely receive a crushing response to what they are doing to Iran and the Iranian nation and to the resistance front,” Khamenei said in video released by Iranian state media.

The AP reports that Khamenei did not elaborate on the timing of the threatened attack, nor the scope. Khamenei had struck a more cautious approach in earlier remarks, saying officials would weigh Iran’s response and that Israel’s attack “should not be exaggerated nor downplayed.”

In other developments:

• Israeli airstrikes on Friday killed at least 52 people and injured scores more, the Lebanese health ministry said, while rockets fired from Lebanon fell on Israel on Saturday. Israeli police said 19 people were injured before dawn on Saturday in the central town of Tira. Three projectiles crossed into Israel from Lebanon, Israel’s military said, and some were intercepted.

• The situation in the northern Gaza Strip is “apocalyptic” as Israel pursues a military offensive against Hamas militants in the area, top United Nations officials have warned. “The entire Palestinian population in north Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence,” they said in a statement on Friday signed by the heads of UN agencies, including the UN children’s agency Unicef and the World Food Programme, and other aid groups.

• The US asked Lebanon to declare a unilateral ceasefire to revive stalled talks to end hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, according to a report later denied by the Lebanese prime minister. Two unnamed sources, a Lebanese political source and a senior diplomat, made the claim to Reuters, saying the US envoy, Amos Hochstein, had communicated the proposal to Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, this week.