Hezbollah confirmed on Saturday that its leader Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli strike a day earlier on Beirut's southern suburbs.

His killing marks a sharp Israeli escalation in nearly a year of tit-for-tat cross-border fire between Hezbollah and Israel, and risks plunging the whole region into a wider war.

On Saturday, the Lebanese health ministry said that Israeli strikes had killed 33 people and wounded 195 others in the country.

"The Israeli aggression against Lebanese regions has resulted in 33 deaths today and has wounded 195 people", the ministry said in a statement on the sixth day of an Israeli bombing campaign on Lebanon.

Israel has raised the prospect of a ground operation against Lebanon, prompting widespread international concern.

Following Nasrallah's death, Netanyahu said Israel had "settled the score" for the killing of Israelis and citizens of other countries, including Americans.

 Unjust bloodshed
 

Iran's First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref denounced the "unjust bloodshed" and threatened that Nasrallah's killing would bring about Israel's "destruction".

Hamas condemned Nasrallah's killing as a "cowardly terrorist act".

Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Syria all declared public mourning, while Yemen's Houthi said they fired a missile at Israel's Ben Gurion airport on Saturday, hoping to hit it as Netanyahu returned from a trip to New York.

US President Joe Biden -- whose government is Israel's top arms supplier -- said it was a "measure of justice", while Kamala Harris, who is running to replace him in the White House, called Nasrallah "a terrorist with American blood on his hands".

Iran called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council in protest at Nasrallah's assassination.

In the letter, Iran's UN envoy Amir Saeid Iravani called on the Security Council to "take immediate and decisive action to stop Israel's ongoing aggression" and prevent it "from dragging the region into full-scale war".

Analysts told AFP that Nasrallah's death leaves Hezbollah under pressure to deliver a response.

Mass displacement
 

More than 700 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon, according to health ministry figures, since the bombardment of Lebanon began earlier this month.

Most of the deaths in Lebanon came on Monday, the deadliest day of violence since the country's 1975-1990 civil war.

UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi said "Well over 200,000 people are displaced inside Lebanon" and more than 50,000 have fled to neighbouring Syria.

Hundreds of families spent the night into Saturday outside as air strikes pounded south Beirut.

"I didn't even pack any clothes, I never thought we would leave like this and suddenly find ourselves on the streets," south Beirut resident Rihab Naseef, 56, told AFP.

Meanwhile, air strikes of unknown origin in eastern Syria killed 12 pro-Iran fighters and wounded a large number of people, a war monitor said Sunday.

The strikes, in and around the city of Deir Ezzor and near the border with Iraq, were not immediately claimed but had targeted military positions, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Diplomats have said efforts to end the war in Gaza were key to halting the fighting in Lebanon and bringing the region back from the brink.

* This story was edited by Ahram Online.