Rocket fire from Lebanon kills seven in Israel

Rocket barrages from Lebanon into northern Israel have killed four foreign workers and three Israelis, Israeli medics say.

They were the deadliest cross-border strikes in Israel since it invaded Lebanon.

Israel kept up airstrikes it says targeted Hezbollah militants across Lebanon, where health authorities on Thursday reported 24 people killed.

US diplomats were in the region pushing for ceasefires in both Lebanon and Gaza, hoping to wind down the wars in the Middle East as the Biden administration enters its final months.

Pressure has been building ahead of the US election on Tuesday.

In northern Gaza, Israeli forces struck one of the last functioning hospitals, according to the World Health Organisation, destroying much-needed supplies the UN agency had delivered to the facility.

Projectiles from Lebanon crashed into an agricultural area in Metula, Israel's northernmost town, killing four foreign workers and an Israeli farmer, local officials said Thursday.

Hours later, the Israeli military reported another volley of some 25 rockets from Lebanon, striking an olive grove in a suburb of the northern Israeli port city of Haifa.

That strike killed a 30-year-old man and 60-year-old woman while wounding two others, said Magen David Adom, Israel's main emergency medical organisation.

Both Hezbollah and Hamas are backed by Iran, Israel's regional adversary.

Hezbollah did not immediately claim responsibility for Thursday's rocket fire. Israel's military said 90 projectiles were fired from Lebanon on Thursday.

Hezbollah has been firing thousands of rockets, drones and missiles into Israel ?and drawing fierce Israeli retaliatory strikes ? over the past year since Hamas' October 7, 2023, attack out of the Gaza Strip triggered Israel's devastating war in the Palestinian enclave.

Israeli strikes killed 24 people in Lebanon on Thursday, among them 13 people in the country's eastern Bekaa Valley, according to Lebanon's state-run National News agency, a day after Israel's military warned residents there to evacuate.

The warnings sent thousands of people fleeing and spread panic across the city, known for its colossal Roman ruins.

The Lebanese Health Ministry reported that in the last 24 hours Israeli bombardments killed 45 people and wounded 110 in various parts of the country.

Senior White House aides Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein were in Israel on Thursday for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior officials about the conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah.

The meetings focused on efforts to secure a ceasefire deal in Lebanon and to assess new proposals floated by mediators to free Israeli hostages being held in Gaza, according to a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But with the US election on Tuesday, hopes for immediate progress appeared remote ? particularly in Gaza where Israel has come under criticism for not letting more humanitarian aid into the besieged north.

The death toll from more than a year of war in Gaza passed 43,000 earlier this week, Palestinian health officials reported.

The Awda Hospital in central Gaza said late on Thursday it had received 16 bodies of people killed by Israeli bombardment of two houses in Nuseirat refugee camp.

The hospital said more than 30 others, including a medic and two journalists, were wounded.

Over the past year, the broadening Israeli campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah has killed 2865 people there, wounded over 13,000 and devastated Lebanese towns near the border.

Some 1.2 million people in Lebanon have been displaced since Israel escalated the conflict into a full-blown war in September, when it launched a wave of heavy airstrikes that killed Hezbollah's top leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and most of his deputies.

A year of Hezbollah rocket attacks have also forced 60,000 Israelis to evacuate from near the border.