The U.N. peacekeeping chief whose force monitors Lebanon’s south said redeploying Lebanese troops there is crucial for any solution to more than a year of Hezbollah-Israel clashes that escalated into war in September.

"The redeployment of the Lebanese armed forces is an absolutely central element to any durable settlement," Under Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix told reporters during a briefing in the Beirut area.

Rescue teams were searching Friday for missing people through rubble near the city of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon where an Israeli strike hit a civil defense center the night before.

Thirteen bodies were recovered, all of them employees and volunteers of the emergency services agency, according to the Lebanese Civil Defense. Some other remains that will require DNA testing were also recovered, it said in a statement.

Fresh strikes targeted Beirut's southern suburbs on Friday following an evacuation order issued by the Israeli army.

Lebanon's state-run National News Agency reported a "heavy strike" carried out with two missiles fired by an "enemy aircraft" in the area of Bourj al-Barajneh and a "heavy raid" near Horsh Beirut, the capital's largest park.

Lebanon’s health ministry said eight people were killed in an Israeli strike on the main eastern city of Baalbek on Thursday, most of them women, revising an earlier toll of three dead.

"The Israeli enemy strike on the Al-Shaab neighborhood in Baalbek killed eight people including five women" and wounded 27 others, a ministry statement said.

More than a year of clashes that escalated into war in September have cost Lebanon more than $5 billion in economic losses and damaged nearly 100,000 housing units, the World Bank said Thursday.

The World Bank report provided estimates for damage between October 8, 2023, and October 27, 2024, saying "the conflict has caused $5.1 billion in economic losses" and that it "damaged an estimated 99,209 housing units" -- mainly in Lebanon's war-torn south.

Lebanon has recently agreed with U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein on a draft agreement that was supposed to be presented to Israel and “so far we have not received any remarks or responses regarding that formula that we discussed,” Speaker Nabih Berri’s aide MP Ali Hassan Khalil said.

Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil has said that he will be happy if Israel “does not triumph over Lebanon or occupy it.”

U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein is expected to present the draft ceasefire agreement to Lebanon within days, the Israel Hayom newspaper has reported.

A close aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his aide Jared Kushner this week that Israel is rushing to advance a ceasefire deal in Lebanon, the Washington Post quoted three current and former Israeli officials briefed on the meeting as saying.

Several Israeli airstrikes have targeted a city in western Syria near the border with Lebanon, Syrian state media said.

Israel's warplanes hit Wednesday bridges and military checkpoints in the area around al-Qusayr and led to the activation of air defenses, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition war monitor.