World powers on Sunday implored Israel and Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah movement to refrain from escalating their conflict as the Gaza war threatened to spill over across the Middle East.

Hezbollah and Israeli forces have traded regular cross-border fire since Palestinian Islamist group Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel sparked the devastating war in Gaza.

But fears of an all-out regional conflagration soared this week as both sides intensified the fighting, with Israeli strikes killing dozens in Lebanon, including top Hezbollah commanders.

Civilians combed through the wreckage of their homes Sunday in the Sudanese city of El-Fasher, besieged for months by paramilitaries who have now launched a "full-scale assault", according to the United Nations.

As the world body's high-level General Assembly meeting prepares this week to spotlight Sudan's 17-month war -- which has claimed tens of thousands of lives and caused the world's largest displacement crisis -- global leaders have warned against cataclysmic violence in the city of two million.

A regional military escalation is not in Israel's "best interest," White House National Security spokesman John Kirby said on Sunday, as heightening cross-border tensions between Israel and Lebanon have led to fears of an all-out war.

"We don't believe that escalating this military conflict is in their best interest," Kirby said on ABC's "This Week," adding that the United States was "saying this directly to our Israeli counterparts."

Hamas's multipronged attack on southern Israel on October 7 was unprecedented in scale. The panic and confusion it caused made many details of what was happening difficult to establish immediately.

Nearly one year later, the confirmed death toll, which includes hostages killed in captivity, now stands at 1,205.

Here is a blow-by-blow timeline of Israel's deadliest day.

- Caught by surprise -

At 6:29 am (0329 GMT), the Israeli army detected thousands of rockets being fired from the Gaza Strip towards Israeli border communities.

An Iraqi professor leading a group of students on a walking tour of Baghdad's historic centre invites them to stop and admire a centuries-old stone wall erected to shield the city from Mongol invaders.

Such a tour would have been unthinkable in the Iraqi capital through much of recent decades due to the country's successive wars, which saw Baghdad pounded from the air, targeted by suicide bombers and hit with car bomb attacks.

Israel and Hezbollah threatened on Sunday to escalate their cross-border attacks despite a chorus of international calls for both sides to step back from the brink of all-out war.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after intense rocket fire from Lebanon that Israel has dealt "a series of blows on Hezbollah that it could have never imagined".

A defiant Hezbollah deputy chief Naim Qassem said the group was in a "new phase" in its battle against Israel.

A blast caused by a gas leak at a coal mine has killed at least 51 people, state media said Sunday, in one of Iran's deadliest work accidents in years.

"The number of dead workers increased to 51" in the explosion at the Tabas mine in eastern Iran, the official IRNA news agency reported, revising an earlier death toll of 30.

It said 20 more were injured.

The explosion occurred at around 9:00 pm (1730 GMT) on Saturday, when around 70 workers were present at the site in South Khorasan province, IRNA said.

The Israeli military said more than 100 projectiles were fired early Sunday from Lebanon, forcing hundreds of thousands to take cover and prompting school closures in Israel's north.

The military said that "approximately 20 projectiles were identified crossing from Lebanon" shortly before 5:00 am (0200 GMT), followed by a barrage of "approximately 85 projectiles" launched from Lebanon after 6:00 am (0300 GMT).

UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan is due Monday in Washington for a first official visit at a time of soaring tensions in the Middle East, seeking to highlight economic and technological cooperation.

Presidential advisor Anwar Gargash said the Emiratis, who want to reorient their economy away from oil and towards new technologies such as AI, were thinking "economy first, prosperity first" in their "strategic relationship" with the United States.

Israel has dealt serious blows to Hezbollah this week by targeting its communications and decimating the leadership of its elite unit, but without crushing the Lebanese group's ability to fight, observers say.

On Friday, an Israeli strike on Hezbollah's stronghold in Beirut's southern suburbs targeted a meeting of the Lebanese movement's Radwan Force, killing 16 members of the elite unit, according to a source close to the group.