Host and defending champion Qatar became the first team to advance to the knockout stage of the Asian Cup tournament on Wednesday after a 1-0 win against Tajikistan.

Akram Afif scored his third goal in two games to secure victory at Al Bayt Stadium and ensure Qatar goes through as Group A winner.

Israel's army chief has said the likelihood of war breaking out on the country's northern border with Lebanon has become "much higher".

"I don't know when the war in the north is, I can tell you that the likelihood of it happening in the coming months is much higher than it was in the past," Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi said in a statement during a visit to northern Israel.

Hamas said it has fired 20 missiles from Lebanon toward a military barracks near Israel's northern coast.

Wednesday's attack was the first rocket attack from Lebanon by the Palestinian militant group since late December and came a day after at least 25 rockets were fired from Gaza into southern Israel in one of the strongest bombardments in more than a week.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea on Wednesday lashed out at the caretaker government for “ceding the strategic military and security decisions to Hezbollah” and “putting the Lebanese people and Lebanon’s higher interests in the face of the region’s storms and the open conflicts among all its parties.”

“At a time all Arab countries, from the biggest one to the smallest one, are distancing themselves from the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the Middle East, we don’t understand according to what logic Lebanon is being implicated in this war, especially that it is currently the smallest and poorest nation due to its ongoing financial, economic and political crisis,” Geagea said in a written statement.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday warned that a "full-fledged confrontation" between Israel and Lebanon would be a "total disaster" amid fears of a wider war.

Addressing the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos, Guterres reiterated his call for an "immediate humanitarian ceasefire" in Gaza.

A major war between Israel and Hezbollah is ruled out until the moment and the U.S. and France have played a key role in weakening this possibility, European diplomatic sources said.

Senior Lebanese officials have contacted the Qatari leadership, including during caretaker PM Najib Mikati’s meetings in Davos, asking it to send Qatari envoy Jassem bin Fahad Al-Thani to Lebanon as soon as possible in order to revive the presidential election file, political sources told al-Liwaa newspaper.

European and Western diplomats have advised Hezbollah, through Lebanese officials, to lower the intensity of its cross-border attacks on Israel during this period in order not to give Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu an excuse to expand the war on the South, a media report said.

A delegation from the Libyan Ministry of Justice is expected to travel to Beirut in the coming days to revive a memorandum of understanding from 2014 regarding the disappearance of Lebanese Shiite cleric imam Moussa Sadr in 1978.

The delegation will meet with the Lebanese justice ministry and the committee overseeing the case of the son of Libya's former leader Moammar Gadhafi, a Lebanese judicial official said.

A judge at Lebanon's highest court suspended the arrest warrants against two former cabinet ministers in the 2020 Beirut port blast case, officials said.

The explosion was one of the world's largest non-nuclear blasts ever recorded.