Exhausted but relieved, hundreds of Turkish citizens and their families docked in southern Turkey late Thursday after being evacuated from war-torn Lebanon on two naval ships sent by Ankara.

"The situation is very bad back in Beirut. My kids were very scared. We are the lucky ones," Esra Gongu, a mother in her thirties told AFP on disembarking from the TCG Bayraktar which docked at 9:00 pm (1800 GMT) after a 13-hour journey.

A second boat, the TCG Sancaktar, was to land at midnight, officials said.

The Committee to Protect Journalists accused Israel of a lack of accountability Thursday over the killing of a Reuters journalist and the wounding of six other reporters including two AFP staff a year after the incident.

The CPJ said the absence of serious investigations into what independent probes conclude was the firing by Israel of tank shells at a group of seven journalists in southern Lebanon gave Israel's forces license to do it again.

At least 22 people were killed in Israeli strikes on a densely populated area of central Beirut on Thursday, the Lebanese health ministry said, with a security source saying a Hezbollah figure was the target.

Israel has repeatedly pounded Beirut's southern suburbs, the bastion of Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, over the last two weeks but Thursday's raid was only the third time the city centre has been targeted.

Israel is deliberately targeting health facilities and killing and torturing medical personnel in Gaza, UN investigators said Thursday, accusing the country of "crimes against humanity".

"Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza's healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza," the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry said in a statement.

The country is "committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities", it added.

UN peacekeepers said Israeli fire on their headquarters in south Lebanon Thursday injured two Blue Helmets, sparking condemnation from European members of the mission.

Israel acknowledged its forces had opened fire in the area, saying the Hezbollah militants on whom it is waging an escalating war operate near UN posts.

Italy, a major contributor of troops to the force, said the acts "could constitute war crimes" while Washington said it was "deeply concerned."

With the prospect of Israeli retaliation for Iran's missile attack looming, some Iranian hardliners want their government to revise its nuclear doctrine to pursue atomic weapons.

Israel has vowed to launch a "deadly, precise, and surprising" attack on Iran in retaliation for its second-ever direct strike on Israeli territory.

On October 1, Iran launched 200 missiles on Israel, in what it said was retaliation for the killing of Tehran-backed militant leaders and a general from Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

The burgeoning alliance between Iran and Russia, which has already seen Tehran assist Moscow in its war against Ukraine, is increasingly troubling the West as tensions reach new highs in the Middle East.

The Islamic republic and Russia have in the last months put aside centuries of regional rivalry going back to the imperial era to focus on a shared confrontation with the West.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met his Qatari counterpart in Doha on Thursday, after Israel warned it would retaliate against his country for a missile attack last week.

Qatar has played a key role in efforts to secure Gaza ceasefire and has called for a truce in Lebanon, where Israel last month intensified air strikes against the Iran-backed Hezbollah.

The wars were the subject of "important consultations" between Araghchi and his counterpart Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said on social media platform X.

An Israeli air strike killed at least 22 people in central Beirut on Thursday as Israeli ground troops in Lebanon were accused of firing on the UN's peacekeeping headquarters, injuring two Blue Helmets.

The raid on Beirut, where an AFP journalist heard several loud explosions, was the third such attack on the centre of the Lebanese capital since Israel escalated its campaign last month.

Lebanon's health ministry issued the updated death toll and said the number of injured had risen to 117.

Wild populations of monitored animal species have plummeted over 70 percent in the last half-century, according to the latest edition of a landmark assessment by WWF published on Thursday.

Featuring data from 35,000 populations of more than 5,000 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish, the WWF Living Planet Index shows accelerating declines across the globe.

In biodiversity-rich regions such as Latin America and the Caribbean, the figure for animal population loss is as high as 95 percent.