Iran’s Mission to the United Nations has issued a statement honoring Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, after Israel said Thursday he had been killed in fighting:

“When U.S. forces dragged a disheveled Saddam Hussein out of an underground hole, he begged them not to kill him despite being armed. Those who regarded Saddam as their model of resistance eventually collapsed. However when Muslims look up to martyr Sinwar standing on the battlefield — in combat attire and out in the open, not in a hideout, facing the enemy — the spirit of resistance will be strengthened. He will become a model for the youth and children who will carry forth his path for the liberation of Palestine. As long as occupation and aggression exist, resistance will endure, for the martyr remains alive and a source of inspiration.”

Hezbollah says it is entering a new phase in its fight against invading Israeli troops, adding that it has introduced new weapons over the past days.

A statement from the group’s operations room overnight said that Hezbollah’s fighters have used new types of precision-guided missiles and explosive drones for the first time.

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.