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Iran on Tuesday launched a major missile attack on Israel, firing scores of rockets as air raids have sounded off in all parts of the country.

Sounds of explosions were heard in the cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The attack comes several days after Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a massive strike on southern Beirut, and comes amid Israeli cross border raids into Lebanon.

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Briefing notes, obtained through freedom of information (FoI) requests by Palestine Action, show details of government meetings, predating the 7 October Hamas attacks and Israel’s response in Gaza, intended to “reassure” Elbit Systems UK, an Israeli arms manufacturer, which is subject to a direct action campaign by the campaign group.

As well as Home Office ministers attending meetings with Elbit Systems representatives, the heavily redacted briefing notes show that one was attended by a director from the Attorney General’s Office said to be representing the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). They also show that Home Office officials contacted the police about Palestine Action.

Tim Crosland, a coordinator of Defend Our Juries, which claims that jurors’ absolute right to acquit a defendant according to their conscience is being eroded by judges placing limits on what defendants can say about their motivations, said: “These disclosures, despite the extensive redaction, are the smoking gun on what has been obvious for a while: the government has been trying to put a stop to juries acquitting those who expose and resist corporate complicity in violations of international law and mass loss of life.

Documents previously revealed through FoI requests suggested Israeli embassy officials in London attempted to get the Attorney General’s Office to intervene in UK court cases relating to the prosecution of protesters.

The US supports plans by Israel to conduct “limited operations to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council told Al Arabiya English on Monday.

Israeli forces began what the US referred to as “limited ground operations” inside Lebanon, the State Department said Monday, stopping short of calling it an invasion.

Meanwhile, the US military said it would be deploying a “few thousand” more troops to the Middle East as the Israeli army began carrying out ground operations inside Lebanon.

Russia is set to increase its spending on defence by 25% in 2025, the highest since the cold war, as Vladimir Putin vows to continue his war efforts in Ukraine and further escalate his standoff with the west.

The latest planned increase in spending will take Russia’s defence budget to a record 13.5tn rubles (£109bn) in 2025, according to draft budget documents published on Monday on the parliament’s website. That is about 3tn rubles more than was set aside for defence this year, which was the previous record.

Taken together, spending on defence and security will account for about 40% of Russia’s total government spending – or 41.5tn rubles in 2025.

The 2025 budget suggests that Putin has embraced what economists have dubbed “military Keynesianism”, marked by a significant rise in military spending, which has fuelled the war in Ukraine, spurred a consumer spending boom and driven up inflation.

Israel has notified the United States it intends to launch a limited ground incursion into Lebanon, US officials said.

The operation could start as soon as Monday, an official told the BBC's US partner CBS.

Israel's defence minister Yoav Gallant earlier implied the army was ready for a ground incursion, telling troops near the Lebanese border Israel was prepared to use forces "from the air, sea, and land" to target Hezbollah.

The Lebanese army is pulling back troops stationed on its southern border to at least 5km (3 miles) north, according to Reuters news agency, which cited a Lebanese security source.

Holding the maps, Netanyahu said the world must choose between a “blessing” and a “curse”.

The first one showed Israel’s potential Arab allies in the region, while the second, Iran and its allies. Both the maps expunged Gaza and the West Bank.

Netanyahu issued stern warnings to Iran, saying: “I have a message for Tehran, if you strike us, we will strike you.”

“There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach, and that’s true of the entire Middle East,” he added.

Microsoft is co-sponsoring a conference in Israel to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Israeli military's Center of Computing and Information Systems unit, known by its Hebrew acronym Mamram. The conference, called "I Love Mamram," is now scheduled to be held in Tel Aviv in November, after the "security situation" (presumably the growing conflict with Lebanon) pushed the date from September.

Mamram is not merely a banal IT service provider for the Israeli military. This summer, as reported by the Israeli news outlet +972 Magazine, a commander in the unit confirmed that it was providing cloud data services and artificial intelligence support for the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip. In a speech at the "IT for IDF" conference held just outside of Tel Aviv this July, Racheli Dembinsky, a colonel in the Israeli army and commander in the information systems unit, confirmed that Mamram was assisting the offensive in Gaza through the provision of internal cloud services that she referred to as a "weapons platform" helping facilitate the campaign. Amid the war, Mamram was providing support to the Israeli military in conducting mass surveillance on the population of Gaza in addition to "marking targets for bombings, a portal for viewing live footage from UAVs over Gaza’s skies, as well as fire, command, and control systems," +972 reported.

In the same speech, Dembinsky indicated that cloud services from civilian tech giants, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, were being employed by the unit for military tasks. After the military's existing technological infrastructure was overwhelmed by the amount of data and intelligence information flowing in during the conflict, services available on contract from tech companies became a stopgap to allow the military to continue operating its platforms. “The crazy wealth of services, big data and AI—we’ve already reached a point where our systems really need it,” Dembinsky said, adding that the services provided “very significant operational effectiveness” during the fighting in Gaza.

Minutes after Missouri executed Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams on Tuesday, his son, Marcellus Williams Jr., addressed a crowd of supporters that had gathered to grieve in front of the state prison in Bonne Terre.

Among them was Maha Odah, a Palestinian American activist with Al-Hadaf Kansas City, a Palestinian liberation organization, who had driven more than two hours to be there. When Williams Jr. began to grieve for his son’s stolen opportunity to know his grandfather, Odah thought of her own experience with loss.

“I saw a mirror,” Odah said, recalling moments spent with Williams’s family. “A reflection of these two systems that are both upheld by the U.S. that condemn Black and Palestinian men, our fathers, our grandfathers, and the rest of our families, at the mercy of those who continue to find ways to dehumanize us.”