Norway evacuated its embassy in Beirut on Thursday after the building housing it and also housing offices of the Al Jazeera news network received a bomb threat.

"We can confirm that the building where the Norwegian embassy in Beirut is located has received a bomb threat today," Norway's foreign ministry spokeswoman Ragnhild Haland Simenstad told AFP in a written statement. The small number of staff still working there had been evacuated.

Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah said Thursday that the Israeli army was not fully in control of any south Lebanon village.

"Until now, the enemy has been unable to take full control of any village," Fadlallah told a press conference at the parliament, adding that Israel was applying "a scorched earth policy through the systematic destruction of villages... seeking to impose a buffer zone with no people, buildings, fields or trees".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a French newspaper that Israeli forces had found "state-of-the-art" Russian weapons in searches of Hezbollah bases in south Lebanon.

Netanyahu highlighted to Le Figaro newspaper, in an interview released Wednesday, that under a 2006 U.N. Security Council resolution only the Lebanese army was allowed to have weapons south of the country's key Litani river.

U.N. Special Coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert stressed to Speaker Nabih Berri days ago "the need to call for" a presidential election session in parliament as soon as possible, al-Akhbar newspaper reported on Thursday.

The mayor of Nabatiyeh Ahmad Kahil was among sixteen people killed Wednesday in Israeli strikes on the municipality of the southern Lebanese city.

"The mayor of Nabatiyeh, among others... was martyred. It's a massacre," Nabatiyeh governor Howaida Turk told AFP, adding he had been in the municipality building.

The World Health Organization has called for the protection of health care facilities in Lebanon, where Israel has intensified its military campaign against Hezbollah in recent weeks.

"WHO calls for an end to attacks on health care facilities," the U.N. agency said in a statement, adding that heavy bombardment was "forcing a growing number of health facilities to close, particularly in southern Lebanon".

The risk of cholera spreading in Lebanon is "very high", the World Health Organization warned Wednesday, after a case of the acute and potentially deadly diarrheal infection was detected in the conflict-hit country.

The WHO highlighted the risk of cholera spreading among hundreds of thousands of people displaced since Israel escalated an air campaign against Hezbollah and launched a ground offensive intended to push the group back from its northern border with Lebanon.

The Israeli military said it has killed a local Hezbollah commander in a southern Lebanese town near the border.

The military said Thursday that an airstrike on Bint Jbeil killed Hussein Awada, who it said was in charge of firing projectiles into Israel from areas near the town.

U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon have said Israeli army forces fired at one of their positions in south Lebanon in a "direct and apparently deliberate" attack that damaged a watchtower.

Peacekeepers in the southern village of Kfarkila observed an Israeli army tank "firing at their watchtower", UNIFIL said Wednesday, adding that "two cameras were destroyed, and the tower was damaged" in what the force called "direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position".

Hezbollah said Thursday it has destroyed two Israeli tanks near the Lebanese border with "guided missiles", after close combat with Israeli troops staging incursions in the area.

The group targeted two Merkava tanks in Labbouneh near the coastal border town of al-Naqoura, as attacks escalated after Israel intensified bombing of the country last month. The attacks burned the tanks and caused casualties, Hezbollah said.