Lebanon’s crisis response unit said 45 people were killed and 179 wounded in the past 24 hours.

The new numbers announced Thursday raises the total toll over the past year of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah to 2,412 killed and 11,285 wounded, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel has “settled its account” with “the person who carried out the worst massacre in the history of our people since the Holocaust.”

Netanyahu addressed the families of the hostages Thursday saying it was an “important moment in the war” to bring home the hostages. He also said anyone who surrendered weapons and assisted with the return of the hostages would be allowed to leave Gaza safely.

Yahya Sinwar masterminded an attack on Israel that shocked the world, unleashing a still-widening catastrophe with no end in sight.

In Gaza, no figure loomed larger in determining the war's trajectory than the 61-year-old Hamas leader. Obsessive, disciplined and dictatorial, he was a rarely seen veteran militant who learned Hebrew over years spent in Israeli prisons and who carefully studied his enemy.

An Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced people in northern Gaza on Thursday killed at least 15 people, including five children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.

The Israeli military said the strike targeted dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants who had gathered at the school.

Shaban al-Dalu was sleeping in his tent in a central Gaza hospital's courtyard, still recuperating from wounds from an Israeli strike on a mosque a week earlier, when a new strike hit, setting off an inferno.

The 19-year-old university student and his 38-year-old mother, Alaa al-Dalu, were among five people killed as the blaze ripped through a tent camp sheltering hundreds of Palestinian families in the courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah. Dozens of others, including children, were severely burned.

Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi discussed rising tensions in the region with Egyptian officials Thursday in Cairo during the first such visit by a top Iranian official to the North African nation in around a decade.

Araghchi held talks with his Egyptian counterpart Badr Abdelatty and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi focusing on efforts to deescalate Israel's conflicts against Gaza and Lebanon.

Long-range American B-2 stealth bombers launched airstrikes early Thursday morning targeting underground bunkers used by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, officials said.

There are no previous reports of the B-2 Spirit being used in the strikes targeting the Houthis, who have been attacking ships for months in the Red Sea corridor over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

Syria’s military said Israel carried out a strike early Thursday in the coastal city of Latakia, wounding two civilians and damaging a military post.

The military statement that was carried by state media did not give further details.

President Volodymyr Zelensky told lawmakers Wednesday that Ukraine's Western partners are increasing pressure to negotiate with Russia, but he hinted such talks would be unfavorable to Kyiv as he unveiled what he called his "victory plan" for the war.

Major points of the plan include an invitation for Ukraine to join NATO and permission to use Western-supplied longer-range missiles to strike military targets deep inside Russian territory — steps that have been met with reluctance by Kyiv's allies so far.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has deployed a team of surgeons to treat war-related wounds at the government-run Rafik Hariri University Hospital in Beirut.

Many of the patients have been evacuated from hospitals in the south as Israeli strikes intensify there. About 1.2 million people have fled southern and eastern Lebanon.