With the U.S. presidential election just a week away, the Biden administration is not giving up hope for short-term deals for cease-fires in Gaza and Lebanon.

In Lebanon, where Israel has been intensifying military operations against Hezbollah for the past month, U.S. officials allow that a short-term fix is probably unrealistic.

Dany Alwan stood shaking as rescue workers pulled remains from piles of rubble where his brother's building once stood.

An Israeli airstrike destroyed the three-story residential building in the quiet Christian village of Aito a day before. His brother, Elie, had rented out its apartments to a friend who'd fled here with relatives from their hometown in southern Lebanon under Israeli bombardment.

Lebanese state media said Tuesday that Israeli tanks have rolled into the outskirts of the village of Khiam, their deepest incursion yet into south Lebanon in the ground operation launched last month.

The official National News Agency reported the entry of "a large number of tanks belonging to the Israeli occupation army" into the eastern outskirts of Khiam, some six kilometers from the border with Israel.

A barrage of projectiles was fired from Lebanon into northern Israel on Tuesday, killing at least one person in the town of Maalot, Israeli emergency services and the military said.

"We saw an unconscious male with no pulse and no breathing... but his injury was critical and we had to pronounce him deceased," emergency service providers Magen Adam David said in a statement after sirens were activated in Maalot.

Senior Israeli officials say the negotiations on a cease-fire deal in Lebanon are "in advanced stages," according to Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

White House special envoy Amos Hochstein may travel to Israel and Lebanon before the November 5 U.S. presidential elections to attempt to reach final agreements, the report says.

Hezbollah announced Tuesday it has chosen deputy head Naim Qassem to succeed Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah as leader after his death in an Israeli strike on south Beirut last month.

"Hezbollah's (governing) Shura Council agreed to elect... Sheikh Naim Qassem as secretary general of Hezbollah," the Iran-backed group said in a statement, more than a month after Nasrallah's killing.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer welcomed his Lebanese counterpart to London on Monday and offered condolences for the deaths of citizens killed in Israeli attacks.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported that more than 2,700 people had been killed and nearly 12,600 wounded in a year of fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. A quarter of those killed were women and children.

Israeli strikes killed at least 60 people and wounded 58 more in various locations in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley amid a surge of intensified airstrikes Monday, Lebanese state media reported.

The highest death toll was in the town of Sahl Allak in the Baalbek province, where 16 people were killed, according to the National News Agency, which listed deaths in 12 different locations in the Bekaa.

The EU foreign policy chief on Monday renewed calls for an "immediate ceasefire" in Lebanon and condemned Israel's "unacceptable attacks" on U.N. peacekeepers.

The offensive against Hezbollah has thrust the UNIFIL peacekeeping mission to the forefront of the escalating conflict in the Middle East.

Hezbollah said its fighters targeted Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon on Monday, after earlier claiming repeated attacks on troops in the same area near the border.

Hezbollah fighters targeted "an Israeli enemy troop gathering" near Wazzani village "with a rocket salvo", the group said in a statement.