U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein’s talks in Paris on Wednesday with French special envoy for Lebanon Jean-Yves Le Drian tackled “the situation in Lebanon in terms of the border war between Israel and Hezbollah and the stalled presidential file,” a media report said.

“The two mediators agreed on the continuation of coordination and the exchange of information regarding the situation in Lebanon,” al-Liwaa newspaper reported on Thursday.

The Israeli military said Thursday its forces were "striking launch posts in southern Lebanon" after "numerous projectiles and suspicious aerial targets crossed from Lebanon into Israeli territory".

It said that most were intercepted by air defense systems but that "fires broke out in a number of areas in northern Israel" following the attacks.

Freya, a 6-month-old lion cub rescued from the wildlife trade in Lebanon, poked a curious nose out of her transport crate and sniffed the air. Satisfied, she took her first cautious steps in her new forever home in a sanctuary in South Africa.

Freya's relocation to the Drakenstein Lion Park is only a partial success story.

Hezbollah said it launched "more than 200" rockets and a salvo of "explosive drones" at Israeli military positions Thursday, in one of its largest barrages, in response to a strike that killed a senior commander of the Iran-backed group.

A Hezbollah statement said that "as part of the response to the... assassination carried out by the enemy" in southern Lebanon's Tyre area on Wednesday, its fighters fired "more than 200 rockets of various types" at five Israeli bases across the border including in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.

With cease-fire talks faltering in Gaza and no clear offramp for the conflict on the Lebanon-Israel border, the daily exchanges of strikes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces have sparked fires that are tearing through forests and farmland on both sides of the frontline.

The blazes — exacerbated by supply shortages and security concerns — have consumed thousands of hectares of land in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, becoming one of the most visible signs of the escalating conflict.

As war rages in Gaza and threatens to spread to Lebanon, Iraqi militant groups warn they are ready to enter the fray against Israel and the United States.

A field commander of the so-called Islamic Resistance in Iraq said there would be "escalation for escalation" in the event of a full-scale war in Lebanon.

Hezbollah said it fired more than 100 rockets at Israeli positions on Wednesday in retaliation for a strike that killed a senior commander in south Lebanon, the movement's second such loss in recent weeks.

Hezbollah and Speaker Nabih Berri told U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein during his latest Beirut visit that there might be “a new phase on the southern front if the Israelis stop the war and the assassinations,” describing such a phase as a “truce,” a senior Lebanese official said.

Hochstein considered this stance “encouraging, seeing as Hezbollah did not link pacification and the truce to the end of security operations in occupied Palestine, but rather to their end in Lebanon, specifically in the south,” the official told Kuwait’s al-Anbaa newspaper in remarks published Wednesday.

White House envoy Amos Hochstein is visiting Paris Wednesday to meet with Macron's Lebanon envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian, after he visited Israel and Lebanon in June.

Hochstein discussed with Lebanese politicians a cease-fire on the Lebanon-Israel border and requested via intermediaries that Hezbollah apply pressure on Hamas to accept a cease-fire and hostage-exchange proposal put forward by U.S. President Joe Biden. Hezbollah rejected the request.

One of France's biggest news channels, BFMTV, was bought by billionaire shipping magnate Rodolphe Saade after the takeover was approved by regulators.

Saade's CMA CGM Group announced the surprise buy-out of Altice Media, which owns BFMTV and the RMC radio station, in March for 1.55 billion euros ($1.66 billion).