Lebanon’s government has approved a plan to deploy more troops along the border with Israel, part of the ceasefire deal that ended the Israel-Hezbollah war.

In a rare Cabinet meeting outside of Beirut, held Saturday at a military base in the southern port city of Tyre, the government also approved a draft law to reconstruct buildings destroyed during the Israel-Hezbollah war that broke out in October 2023 and ended with a U.S.-brokered ceasefire last week.

A source close to Hezbollah said Saturday that the group sent 2,000 fighters to a part of Syria near the border with Lebanon, as ally Damascus reels from a rebel offensive that has seized major cities in recent days.

Lebanon’s General Security Directorate said the country is closing all land border crossing with Syria except for a main one that links Beirut with the Syrian capital Damascus.

The decision by the security agency in charge of border crossings came hours after an Israeli airstrike damaged the Arida border crossing with Syria in north Lebanon, days after it was reopened.

Kataeb leader MP Sami Gemayel said that Hezbollah has surrendered and south Lebanon was destroyed in only 10 days of Israeli strikes.

Gemayel demanded Hezbollah be disarmed, stressing that the group has stopped being a Lebanese "resistance" movement since it entered Syria, in support of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein will attend a presidential election session scheduled for January 9, LBCI reported.

The media outlet said that Hochstein has promised Speaker Nabih Berri that he'll attend the session, after the latter invited him in a phone call.

Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil said he supports Hezbollah in defending Lebanon but not in exposing it, calling for a full implementation of the ceasefire with Israel and for keeping Lebanon away from regional conflicts.

"We have lost the deterrence equation but Israel today cannot stroll in Lebanon the way it did in 1982," Bassil said in a televised interview. "There is neither defeat nor victory, but the Shiites now know that they cannot bet on other arenas and cannot continue with wrong choices."

Hezbollah has sent "a small number of supervising forces" from Lebanon to Syria overnight to back the government's counteroffensive against a surprise advance by insurgents who were advancing Friday towards the strategic city of Homs, Reuters reported.

The British news agency said it has learned from three officials close to Tehran that "elite forces from Hezbollah had crossed over from Lebanon overnight and had taken up positions in Homs."

Israel’s army said Friday it had conducted air strikes on Hezbollah "weapon-smuggling routes" on the Syria-Lebanon border, just over a week into a fragile ceasefire in Lebanon.

The Israeli air force "conducted strikes on weapon-smuggling routes and terror infrastructure sites located near the Syrian regime’s crossings at the Syrian-Lebanese border", the military said in a statement that included a map identifying the crossing as Al-Arida.

Hezbollah chief Sheikh Naim Qassem said Thursday that his Iranian-backed group, an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, would be by Damascus’ side as Islamist-led rebels press a sweeping offensive.

By Jasmin Lilian Diab, Lebanese American University

(THE CONVERSATION) The ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah has brought a cautious sense of relief to a Lebanese population battered by a yearlong conflict, not least the more than 1 million people displaced during the escalation of violence between September and November 2024.