Iran’s foreign minister on Tuesday reiterated that his country does not seek an escalation in the Middle East but reserved the right to defend itself against Israel’s attack with a “measured and calculated” response.

Iranian officials are increasingly threatening to launch yet another strike against Israel after its Oct. 26 attack on the Islamic Republic that targeted military bases and other locations and killed at least five people.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has approved sending an additional 7,000 draft notices to members of the country’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

Under long-standing political arrangements, ultra-Orthodox Jews had been exempt from military service, which is compulsory for most Jewish men and women. However, Israel’s Supreme Court in June ordered the government to begin drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish men into the army.

The Lebanese Red Cross will send another convoy Tuesday to Wata al-Khiam in southern Lebanon to search for and remove the bodies of 15 people killed in an Israeli airstrike, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said.

Paramedics accessed the site of the strike two days prior and removed five other bodies, but needed to return with larger vehicles to remove the rubble. The NNA said the deployment is in coordination with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, which is the usual procedure.

A crowd of enraged survivors hurled clots of mud left by storm-spawned flooding at the Spanish royal couple during their first visit to the center of their nation's deadliest natural disaster in living memory.

Spain's national broadcaster reported that the barrage included a few rocks and other objects and that two bodyguards were treated for injuries. One could be seen with a bloody wound on his forehead.

Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his demands that the winner of the presidential race be declared shortly after polls close Tuesday, well before all the votes are counted.

The Biden administration is stepping up criticism of Israel for not doing enough to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza as a 30-day deadline looms for Israeli officials to meet certain requirements or risk potential restrictions on military assistance.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller on Monday gave Israel a "fail" grade in terms of meeting the conditions for an improvement in aid deliveries to Gaza laid out in a letter last month to senior Israeli officials from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

A senior Hamas official said members of the militant group held a meeting with a delegation from the rival Fatah party in Cairo to discuss the war in Gaza and the enclave’s future governance, though the meeting did not lead to any major breakthroughs.

Osama Hamdan described the talks between the two heavyweights of Palestinian politics as “positive” but “frank.” He said the two sides discussed the formation of a future government for the Palestinian territories but provided few details as to how and when that would occur.

Palestinian officials say Israeli forces have killed three people in the occupied West Bank.

Two were killed in an airstrike early Tuesday near the northern city of Jenin, a flashpoint for Israeli-Palestinian violence in recent years. A third person was shot in the village of Tamoun, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Palestinian medical officials say an Israeli airstrike in the northern Gaza Strip has killed at least 20 people, mostly women and children.

Hossam Abu Safiya, the director of a nearby hospital that received the casualties, said the strike late Monday hit a home in the town of Beit Lahiya where multiple families were sheltering.

The 13-month war between Israel and Hezbollah has killed more than 3,000 people in Lebanon, the country's Health Ministry said, more than double the number of people killed since their last major war two decades ago.

The war shows no signs of ending, and Israel has said it is carrying out new operations targeting Hezbollah infrastructure across Lebanon and in parts of Syria while Hezbollah continues to launch dozens of rockets into northern Israel.