The Israeli military said overnight that five soldiers had been killed in combat in southern Lebanon, taking to 19 the number of troop deaths announced since Israel began raids into Lebanon last month.

Hezbollah says it is entering a new phase in its fight against invading Israeli troops, adding that it has introduced new weapons over the past days.

A statement from the group’s operations room overnight said that Hezbollah’s fighters have used new types of precision-guided missiles and explosive drones for the first time.

Lebanon’s crisis response unit said 45 people were killed and 179 wounded in the past 24 hours.

The new numbers announced Thursday raises the total toll over the past year of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah to 2,412 killed and 11,285 wounded, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

Washington will allow some Lebanese nationals to temporarily remain in the United States and apply for work authorization due to unsafe conditions in their home country, the Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday.

The so-called Temporary Protected Status designation will provide an "immigration reprieve" to eligible Lebanese due to the "ongoing armed conflict and extraordinary and temporary conditions in Lebanon," the department said in a statement.

A German warship deployed as part of the UNIFIL peacekeeping force in Lebanon has shot down a drone off the Lebanese coast, the German army said Thursday.

"An unidentifiable unmanned aerial vehicle was detected in the vicinity" of the "Ludwigshafen am Rhein" corvette and was "brought down in a controlled manner", an army spokesman said. The drone’s explosive load detonated in the process.

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.