Russia says risk of big regional war very high after killing of Hezbollah leader

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Kremlin on Monday condemned the killing of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli air attack last week and said it assessed the risk of a major Middle East war as "extremely high".

"The Russian side condemns such actions, we believe that they have led to a significant destabilisation of the situation in the region," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

"The main thing is that such indiscriminate bombing of residential areas in Lebanon leads to a huge number of human casualties, which will inevitably bring on a humanitarian catastrophe like the one we are seeing in Gaza," he added, expressing Moscow's "deepest concern".

Israel's intensifying assault on Hezbollah has deepened international concerns about the risk of a wider Middle East war involving Iran, which backs Hezbollah and Hamas.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described the killing of Nasrallah at the weekend as a political assassination and the Russian foreign ministry in a statement called on Israel to immediately stop hostilities in Lebanon.

(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov; Writing by Lucy Papachristou and Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Andrew Osborn)