Israel has killed eight people in new attacks on southern Lebanon, officials said according to a report, despite Donald Trump pleading with Benjamin Netanyahu to halt strikes on Iran and Lebanon.

An Israeli airstrike hit a popular housing district in the ancient southern Lebanese city of Tyre, civil defence officials told Al Jazeera Arabic.

The Israeli military earlier had issued an evacuation order for the entire city, including its Christian quarter which has previously been excluded from evacuation zones.

Tyre, the fifth largest city in Lebanon with a peacetime population of around 200,000, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Israel’s attack comes after it agreed to halt their attacks after the two sides exchanged fire for the first time since the April truce, threatening to plunge the Middle East back into full-scale war.

As we reported earlier, a U.S. Apache helicopter has crashed near the Strait of Hormuz, hours after hostilities in the region escalated with Iran and Israel exchanging their first direct strikes in two months.

The helicopters, which cost around $35 million to $40 million, have been used by the U.S. military to police a blockade of Iranian ports near the strait, as part of its large military presence in the region.

Apache aircraft have been previously used to attack Iranian small boats – but the U.S. military has not said whether the helicopter was shot down by Iranian fire, experienced mechanical failure or encountered some other problem.

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Iran’s football federation (FFIRI) has said that its ticket allocation for the World Cup has been pulled just days before football’s global showpiece kicks off.

The move has left supporters who had already made travel plans unable to attend their team’s matches.

“This is despite the fact that many Iranian football fans, relying on the officially announced process, had already made the necessary plans to attend the matches,” the FFIRI added in a statement.

A US fighter jet fired at a tanker in the Gulf of Oman to prevent it from violating the American blockade of Iran, sparking a fire and forcing the vessel’s Indian crew to evacuate.

The MT Marivex was sailing in international waters towards Iran when it was ​struck by an F/A-18 Super Hornet from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham ⁠Lincoln, Centcom said. The attack caused a fire onboard, but all 24 Indian crew members of the Palau-flagged vessel were able to evacuate safely with help from the Omani authorities, Indian and US officials said on Monday.

The jet fired into the ship’s engineering and steering spaces to disable it after the crew failed to ​comply with directions from US forces, Centcom said. “Marivex is no longer sailing to Iran,” it added.

The unladen oil tanker reported a fire at around 1.30pm local time on Monday, with the crew requesting immediate evacuation.

The attack reportedly damaged the tanker’s lifeboats, leaving the crew unable to escape without help.

All 24 Indian crew members of a Palau-flagged tanker were rescued after it was attacked by the US Navy off the coast of Oman.

US troops attacked MT Marivex, which was blacklisted and sanctioned by the US treasury department, according to reports.

On three occasions, the vessel turned away after repeated warnings by the US Navy, India’s PTI news agency reported.

The vessel made another attempt to run past the blockade by using Omani territorial waters and switched off its signal devices to go undetected, the report found.

The Indian embassy in Oman thanked the local authorities for rescuing the Indian crew members.

The latest threat of a new Middle East conflagration seems to have been averted in the final minutes of the eleventh hour.

After launching strikes on northern Israel that broke a six-week-long ceasefire, Iran announced that it was halting what it had said would be a week-long operation. Within the hour, Israel had announced that it would be halting its retaliatory strikes on Iran, at Donald Trump’s request.

It would be premature in the extreme, however, to believe that the danger has passed. Iran’s strikes on northern Israel, and Israel’s response, which included targeting Tehran, represented not just a resumption of the conflict that began with the US-Israel attack on Iran some 100 days ago, but a risk that the war would spread beyond those countries, including the Gulf states, already affected.

With the Iran-backed Houthis of Yemen renewing their threat to target ships linked to Israel traversing the Red Sea and Iran continuing to block the Strait of Hormuz, the spectre was raised of all north-south traffic in the whole region being brought to a halt. All too predictably, oil prices rose. Of the many perilous points in the conflict over the past five months, this was the most perilous to date.