A massive explosion tore through Iran’s largest commercial port on Saturday, killing at least 25 people and wounding nearly 800 others, according to state media.

The blast occurred at Shahid Rajaei Port in southern Iran’s Bandar Abbas city near the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil output passes.

The port’s customs office said in a statement carried by state television that the explosion probably resulted from a fire that broke out at the hazardous and chemical materials storage depot.

Images from the official news agency IRNA showed rescuers and survivors walking along a wide boulevard carpeted with debris after the blast at Shahid Rajaei, more than 1,000km (620 miles) south of Tehran.

Flames engulfed a truck trailer and blood stained the side of a crushed car, while a helicopter dropped water on massive black smoke clouds billowing from behind stacked shipping containers.

Citing local emergency services, state TV reported that “hundreds have been transferred to nearby medical centres”, while the provincial blood transfusion centre issued a call for donations.

The explosion came several months after one of Iran’s deadliest work accidents in years. The coal mine blast in September, caused by a gas leak, killed more than 50 people at Tabas in the east of the country.

Saturday’s explosion came amid high-level Iran-US talks in Oman on Tehran’s nuclear programme, with both sides reporting progress.

Hussein al-Sheikh is a veteran leader of Abbas’s Fatah movement.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has appointed a close aide as vice president, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) said.

Hussein al-Sheikh was named “deputy (vice president) of the PLO leadership,” Wasel Abu Yousef, a member of the PLO’s Executive Committee, said on Saturday.

Abbas, 89, created the vice presidency position during the 32nd session of the Palestinian Central Council in Ramallah earlier this week.

During the session, Abbas reaffirmed his commitment to initiating a “comprehensive national dialogue”, which aims to engage “all Palestinian factions to achieve reconciliation and reinforce national unity,” the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

Abbas also informed the committee on “upcoming political efforts aimed at halting the ongoing Israeli aggression and war of genocide in the Gaza Strip”.

These include ensuring the rapid entry of humanitarian and medical aid, full Palestinian governance over Gaza and pushing for a total Israeli withdrawal from the enclave as “a step towards launching a political process to end the occupation and realize an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital”, according to WAFA.

The appointment follows years of international pressure to reform the PLO and comes as Arab and Western powers envision an expanded role for the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Gaza Strip’s post-war governance.

Founded in 1964, the PLO is tasked with negotiating and signing international treaties on the Palestinian people’s behalf, while the PA is responsible for governance in limited parts of the occupied Palestinian territory.

The PLO is an umbrella organisation comprising several Palestinian factions, but not the Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups.

Sheikh, 64, is a veteran leader of Abbas’s Fatah movement, which dominates the PA, and is considered close to the president.

Analyst Aref Jaffal said the new role was created to pave the way for someone to take the reins from Abbas, “as there are many things the Palestinian situation requires”.

“The Palestinian political system is already miserable, so I believe that all these arrangements are a prelude to creating a successor to Abbas,” Jaffal, director of the Al-Marsad Election Monitoring Center, told AFP.

The PLO Executive Committee is set to hold another meeting next Saturday to appoint a new secretary-general.

The entire Strip, with a population of two million people, may be on the brink of famine as the World Food Programme runs out of supplies.

At least 13 Palestinians have been killed since dawn and dozens of others buried under the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli air attack on Gaza City.

Four victims, at least, were killed in a strike on a home in the city’s Sabra neighbourhood on Saturday, with the residents forced to dig the ground with their bare hands to reach people buried in the debris.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza’s civil defence agency, said a lack of rescue equipment has prevented emergency workers from reaching those buried underneath the collapsed building bombed by Israel before dawn.

“Our crews cannot reach them because of the lack of the necessary machinery,” he told the AFP news agency.

Earlier this week, Israeli aircraft destroyed 40 engineering vehicles the civil defence teams were using to remove heavy debris during rescue operations.

Israeli air raids also hit other parts of the Strip on Saturday, including al-Mawasi and Khan Younis, as the besieged territory faces impending mass starvation amid an ongoing genocide.

After 18 months of the Israeli military invasion that has killed more than 51,000 Palestinians, the situation in Gaza “is probably the worst” it has been, the United Nations warned.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) on Friday said the entire Strip, with a population of two million people, may be on the brink of famine and aid kitchens are “expected to fully run out of food in the coming days”.

Israel’s ongoing blockade has meant no food, fuel or medicine has entered Gaza for two months. For many Palestinians in Gaza, community kitchens were their only source of nutrition after Israeli forces destroyed almost all food production facilities.

WFP has appealed to the international community to put pressure on Israel to lift the blockade, saying more than 116,000 metric tonnes of food assistance – enough to feed one million people for up to four months – are already positioned for delivery “as soon as borders reopen”.

Reporting from Deir el-Balah on Saturday, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said the humanitarian crisis in the besieged territory “has reached a very unprecedented breaking point”.

“Civilians are really struggling to cope with this crisis,” he said.

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, said the crisis was “man-made”.

Michael Fakhri, UN rapporteur on the right to food, said Israel is “executing this starvation campaign with no repercussions”.

The World Health Organization said the situation was no different for medical supplies, with WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pleading on X for the aid blockade to end.

At least 2,062 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel resumed its deadly campaign against Hamas on March 18, and more than 50,000 since October 7, 2023. Hamas’s attack on Israel killed 1,218 people, mostly civilians.