Sweden said Saturday it was shutting its embassy in Beirut amid fears the war in Gaza could escalate into a region-wide conflict, after urging thousands of its citizens to leave Lebanon.

A source close to Hezbollah said late Friday that Israel carried out strikes on a convoy of trucks entering Lebanon from Syria.

MP Alain Aoun of the Strong Lebanon bloc has been officially expelled from the Free Patriotic Movement, the FPM’s media department said on Friday.

The FPM said the decision follows “two recommendations issued by the FPM’s Council of Elders that is led by (former) president Michel Aoun.”

UK Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, accompanied by Defense Secretary John Healey, ended a one-day visit to Lebanon yesterday, Thursday, the British embassy said.

Two days after the assassination of Hezbollah’s top military commander Fouad Shukur and Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed international mediators that “Israel has become readier to engage in a deal over Gaza,” a media report said.

“Bring me the other party so that I talk to them over the deal!” the pro-Hezbollah al-Akhbar newspaper quoted Netanyahu as saying.

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Friday stressed that “in the face of the systematic and dangerous Israeli escalation,” Lebanon “can only stress its right to defend its land, sovereignty and dignity with all means available.”

“We have informed brotherly and friendly countries that we are advocates of peace not war, because we are seeking sustainable stability through regaining the occupied parts of our dear south and compelling the Israeli enemy to implement U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 with all its stipulations,” Mikati said, during a visit to the Army Command on the occasion of Army Day.

Hezbollah targeted Friday Israeli soldiers in the Dhaira post with artillery shells and a post in the occupied Kfarshouba Hills, as it resumed its operations against Israel, three days after Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander.

Israeli drones meanwhile raided the southern towns of Rab Tlatine and Dhaira.

Free Patriotic movement chief Jebran Bassil said the FPM cannot stand idly by as Israel strikes Beirut and kills children.

Bassil's comment, late Thursday, came two days after an Israeli air strike killed a Hezbollah top commander in Haret Hreik. The raid on the Beirut suburb, an overcrowded residential area, killed siblings Amira and Hassan Fadlallah as well as three women and injured dozens of civilians.

Hezbollah fired overnight anti-aircraft missiles on Israeli warplanes in south Lebanon, forcing them to retreat beyond the border.

The group had launched rockets at northern Israel Thursday "in response" to a deadly Israeli strike in south Lebanon -- the group's first attack after Israel killed a top commander earlier this week.

A Syrian family of four were killed Thursday in an Israeli strike on their house in the southern village of Shamaa in the Tyre district.

A mother and her three children were killed as Israeli warplanes targeted their house, local media reports said. Several others were injured in the strike.