Washington:

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on Israel during a Monday meeting with its defense minister to avoid further escalation in Lebanon as they discussed efforts to reach a deal to free hostages in Gaza.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was on a visit to Washington seeking to reaffirm the value of ties with Israel’s top ally, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly chastised the United States for what he said was a delay in weapons deliveries.

In a two-hour meeting with Gallant at the State Department, Blinken discussed indirect diplomacy between Israel and Hamas on an agreement that “secures the release of all hostages and alleviates the suffering of the Palestinian people,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

Blinken also “underscored the importance of avoiding further escalation of the conflict and reaching a diplomatic resolution that allows both Israeli and Lebanese families to return to their homes,” Miller said in a statement.

Tensions have been rising with growing exchanges of fire between Israel and Lebanon’s Iranian-backed militant movement Hezbollah.

Netanyahu has said Israeli forces are winding up the most intense part of the Gaza war and will redeploy to the northern border, although he cast the move as defensive.

Gallant also met CIA chief Bill Burns, the key US pointman in negotiations to free hostages from Hamas.

“I would like to emphasize that it is Israel’s primary commitment to return the hostages, with no exception, to their families and homes,” Gallant said before starting his meetings.

“We will continue to make every possible effort to bring them home,” he said.

The minister made no further comment as he left the meeting with Blinken, as a few dozen protesters outside the State Department chanted to call him a “war criminal.”

– Arms shipment dispute –

President Joe Biden on May 31 laid out a plan for a ceasefire in Gaza and release of hostages.

Hamas, which launched the conflict with its October 7 attack on Israel, has come back with its own demands, and the United States hopes the gaps can be bridged.

Netanyahu, who has faced major protests calling for him to accept the deal, in recent days has annoyed the Biden administration by accusing Washington of cutting back arms and ammunition deliveries.

Gallant took a different tack, saying: “The alliance between Israel and the United States, led by the US over many years, is extremely important.”

Other than Israel’s own military, “our ties with the US are the most important element for our future from a security perspective,” he said.

Biden, who has faced criticism from parts of his own base over his support for Israel, held back a shipment that included heavy 2,000-pound bombs.

Netanyahu — who has close relations with Biden’s rivals in the Republican Party — told a cabinet meeting on Sunday that there was a “dramatic drop in the supply” of US weapons around four months ago.

Asked about his latest remark, Miller told reporters, “I don’t understand what that comment meant at all.”

“We have paused one shipment of high-payload munitions. That shipment remains on pause,” Miller told reporters.

“There are other weapons that we continue to provide Israel, as we have done going back years and years, because we are committed to Israel’s security. There has been no change in that,” Miller said.

Miller said the United States would also press Israel to work on longer-term arrangements after the end of the fighting.

“We don’t want to see in Rafah what we’ve seen in Gaza City and what we’ve seen in Khan Yunis, which is the end of major combat operations and then the beginning of Hamas reasserting control,” he said, referring to two other major cities targeted by Israel earlier in the war.

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Beirut:

A local official in Lebanon and state media said an Israeli strike Sunday on a southern village killed several family members, with Hezbollah fighters announcing rocket fire in retaliation.

Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group have exchanged regular cross-border fire since Palestinian group Hamas’s unprecedented October attack on southern Israel sparked the war in Gaza.

Fighting has intensified in recent weeks, with Israel striking deeper into Lebanese territory, while Hezbollah has stepped up its missile and drone attacks on military positions in northern Israel.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said the strike in Mais al-Jabal killed “four people from a single family”, updating an earlier reported death count of three dead in the raid it said was carried out by Israeli aircraft.

It identified them as a man, a woman and their children aged 12 and 21, and said two other people were wounded.

A Lebanese security source, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media, confirmed the strike killed “four civilians”.

Mais al-Jabal municipality chief Abdelmoneim Shukair had earlier told AFP that three people were killed, saying they were a couple and their son.

Hezbollah in a statement said it fired “dozens of Katyusha and Falaq rockets” at Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel “in response to the horrific crime that the Israeli enemy committed in Mais al-Jabal”.

It later said it fired dozens more Katyusha rockets at Israeli troops and vehicles across the border “as part of the response” to the Mais al-Jabal strike.

The Israeli army told AFP that “about 40 rockets were identified crossing” from Lebanon, “some of which were intercepted”.

“At the moment, no casualties have been reported,” it added.

Hezbollah has repeatedly declared that only a ceasefire in Gaza will put an end to its attacks on Israel, which it says are in support of Gazans and its ally Hamas.

Both the United States and France have made diplomatic efforts to calm tensions on the Lebanese-Israeli border.

In Lebanon, at least 390 people have been killed in nearly seven months of cross-border violence, mostly militants but also more than 70 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

Israel says 11 soldiers and nine civilians have been killed on its side of the border.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced on both sides.

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Beirut:

Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group said it launched a drone and missile attack on an Israeli base on Wednesday in response to strikes that killed three Hezbollah fighters the day before.

Israel and Hamas ally Hezbollah have been exchanging near-daily cross-border fire since the Palestinian group attacked southern Israel on October 7, triggering war in the Gaza Strip.

But Wednesday’s incident marked the third day in a row that Hezbollah strikes wounded people in Israel, with regional tensions high after Iran launched a direct attack on Israel over the weekend in retaliation for a deadly strike on Tehran’s Damascus consulate.

Hezbollah said it launched “a combined attack with guided missiles and explosive drones on a new military reconnaissance command centre in Arab al-Aramshe,” an Arab-majority village of northern Israel.

The attack came “in response to the enemy assassinating a number of resistance fighters in Ain Baal and Shehabiya” on Tuesday, the movement said.

Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, said six people had been injured after a strike in Western Galilee.

The six injured are “men in their 30s, including: 1 in serious condition,” the rescuers said on X, formerly Twitter.

The Israeli army said “a number of launches from Lebanon were identified crossing into the area of Arab al-Aramshe,” adding that it struck the sources of the fire.

On Tuesday, Israel said its strikes in south Lebanon killed two local Hezbollah commanders and another operative, with the Iran-backed group saying three of its members were killed as it launched rockets in retaliation.

Local Israeli authorities said three people were wounded in a strike from Lebanon earlier that day.

On Monday, Hezbollah targeted Israeli troops with explosive devices, wounding four soldiers who crossed into Lebanese territory, the first such attack in six months of clashes.

The violence has killed at least 368 people in Lebanon, mostly Hezbollah fighters but also at least 70 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

In Israel, the military says 10 soldiers and eight civilians have been killed near the northern border since hostilities began.

Tens of thousands of civilians have fled their homes on both sides of the border, with the violence fuelling fears of all-out conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, which last went to war in 2006.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Beirut:

An Israeli strike on a truck in Syria near the Lebanese border killed two Hezbollah members at dawn on Sunday, a war monitor said.

“Israel struck a civilian truck with a missile near the Syrian-Lebanese border,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a report.

The strike led to “the death of at least two Hezbollah members”, said the Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of sources in Syria.

Hezbollah later announced in separate statements that two of its fighters were “martyred on the road to Jerusalem”, the phrase it uses to refer to members killed by Israeli fire.

A source close to Hezbollah confirmed that both were killed this morning in Syria.

Syrian state media did not report the strike.

Since Syria’s civil war began in 2011 following an uprising against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, Israel has launched hundreds of air strikes in Syria, primarily against pro-Iran forces, among them Hezbollah and the Syrian army.

The strikes have multiplied amidst the ongoing war in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas.

An Israeli strike on a Damascus residential neighbourhood on Wednesday killed three Iran-backed fighters, a Syrian and two foreigners, according to the Observatory.

On February 10, the Observatory reported an Israeli strike on a building west of Damascus that killed three people from pro-Iran militias.

Since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7, Hezbollah has announced the death of 16 members killed by Israeli strikes in Syria.

The Israeli military announced on February 3 that it had “attacked, from the ground and air, more than 50 such targets of Hezbollah spread throughout Syria”.

Israel rarely comments on individual strikes but has repeatedly said it will not allow Iran to expand its presence in Syria.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)