President Emmanuel Macron has named close ally Sébastien Lecornu as new French prime minister, 24 hours after a vote of confidence ousted François Bayrou as head of his government.

Lecornu, 39, was among the favourites to take over the job, and has spent the past three years as armed forces minister, with a focus on France’s response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

In a statement the Elysée Palace said he had been given the task of consulting political parties with the aim of adopting France’s next budget.

Bayrou had visited the president hours earlier to hand in his resignation, paving the way for Lecornu to become the fifth prime minister of Macron’s second term as president.

Lecornu will face the same challenges as his predecessor, including getting a cost-cutting budget past parliament without a majority.

France has a spiralling public debt, which hit €3.3tn (£2.8tn) earlier this year and represents 114% of the country’s economic output or GDP.

Bayrou had proposed €44bn in budget cuts, and his decision to put his plans to a vote of confidence was always going to fail. In the end France’s National Assembly decided to oust his government by 364 votes to 194.

Lecornu’s appointment has already been condemned by parties on both the left and right, an indication of the difficulties he will face.

On Friday, the credit agency Fitch will reassess France’s debts and could make its borrowing costs higher if it lowers its rating from AA-.

More immediately, a grassroots movement called Bloquons Tout – “Let’s Block Everything” – is planning widespread anti-government protests on Wednesday and authorities are planning to deploy 80,000 police.

Qatar’s foreign ministry says Israel’s attack targeting residential building housing Hamas officials a ‘flagrant violation of international law’.

Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has condemned “in the strongest terms the cowardly Israeli attack” on a residential building housing Hamas leaders in the capital Doha, calling the assault a “blatant violation of all international laws and norms”.

“The State of Qatar affirms that it will not tolerate this reckless Israeli behavior and its continued tampering with regional security, as well as any action targeting its security and sovereignty,” ministry spokesperson Majed al-Ansari said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Investigations are underway at the highest level, and further details will be announced as soon as they become available.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed in a statement that the Israeli military carried out the attack in Doha on Tuesday against Hamas leaders. The attack came as negotiators from Hamas were meeting to consider the latest Gaza ceasefire proposal from the United States.

“Today’s action against the top terrorist chieftains of Hamas was a wholly independent Israeli operation,” Netanyahu said in a social media post.

“Israel initiated it, Israel conducted it, and Israel takes full responsibility.”

Explosions were reported in Doha in the first such attack by Israel in Qatar, a key mediator in ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas and home to the region’s largest US military base, Al Udeid Air Base.

Israel’s military released a statement on Tuesday saying it and the Shin Bet intelligence service “carried out a targeted attack on the top leadership of the Hamas terrorist organization”.

Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford, reporting from Doha, said the area targeted in Doha is full of residential units.

“This is a large residential area containing a lot of foreign embassies. Many civilians live here. There’s a Lebanese school that isn’t far from here, and the echoes of the explosions were heard across the city and farther afield,” he said.

Al Jazeera correspondent Nida Ibrahim said from Doha that the unprecedented attack on the city, which has hosted negotiations for a potential ceasefire in Gaza, reflected how “emboldened” Israel has become “by being able to carry out a genocide and getting away with it”.

Reporting from Amman, Jordan, Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut said the strike in a third country was similar to Israel’s assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran last year.

Israel has been bombarding Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria as well as carrying out daily attacks in the occupied West Bank in Palestine. It has killed more than 64,000 people in Gaza since launching its brutal military offensive in October 2023.

Its military actions in Gaza have been termed genocide by numerous rights groups, and the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes.

For more coverage of the latest developments in Israel’s 23 months of genocidal war in Gaza, follow Al Jazeera’s live coverage here.

Twenty-three people have been killed in a Russian air strike on a village in eastern Ukraine, according to a local official.

The victims were ordinary people collecting their pensions in the Donetsk settlement of Yarova, said President Volodymr Zelensky. Donetsk regional leader Vadym Filashkin said emergency services were at the scene and as many people were wounded as killed.

Yarova is to the north of Slovyansk, one of the big cities in the region, and not far from the front line as Russian forces advance slowly in the east.

If confirmed, the death toll would be among the heaviest attacks on Ukrainian civilians in recent weeks, 42 months into Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Twenty-three people were killed in overnight air strikes on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv at the end of August.

At the weekend Russia launched its biggest air assault of the war on Kyiv so far, hitting the main government building in the capital, in what Zelensky said was a “ruthless” attack aimed at prolonging the war.

Posting graphic footage of the attack on Yarova online, Zelensky said there were “no words” to describe the latest Russian strikes. There was no immediate response from Russia’s military.

The head of the local administration in nearby Lyman, Oleksandr Zhuravlyov, said the attack took place at about 10:40 local time (07:40 GMT) on Tuesday, as pensions were being handed out.

Twenty-three people had been killed and another 18 wounded according to latest casualty figures, he told Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne.

Pictures from the scene showed a badly damaged Ukrainian postal service vehicle of the type used to distribute pensions.

The head of the Ukrposhta service said the vehicle had been parked under trees as a security measure and a local postal official had been wounded in the attack. “Maybe someone gave away the co-ordinates,” he speculated.

Yarova sits on a key railway line between the cities of Lyman and Izium. It is also only about 6km (3.7 miles) away from the next village of Novoselivka, where Russian forces are closing in on the outskirts.

Zhuravlyov told Suspilne they had to work out how the postal service could continue to hand out pensions: “Because the front line is less than 10km away, we will ‘move away’ all these payments, so they can have their pensions in safer places.”

Ukraine’s state emergency service said another three people had died in earlier Russian shelling of settlements in Donetsk.

“The world must not remain silent,” Zelensky said, calling for a response from both the US, Europe and the G20 group of nations.