Jewish people mark on Monday the start of Passover, a celebration of freedom, and around many holiday tables in Israel chairs will stand empty for hostages still held captive in Gaza.

The week-long Jewish festival, also known in Hebrew as the "holiday of freedom", celebrates the Israelites' liberation from Egyptian slavery, as told in the Bible.

Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz has reassured residents of northern Israel that the "moment of truth" is approaching in terms of how to proceed militarily against Hezbollah.

"This is the operations front with the greatest and most urgent challenge, and this is how we must treat it," said Gantz.

Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil is continuing his “openness initiative” towards the Shiite Duo, a media report said.

It seems that Bassil’s steps “are much bigger than the political-electoral alliance at the elections of the Beirut Order of Engineers and Architects, the repeated meetings between Bassil and Speaker Nabih Berri, and the resumption of meetings with Hezbollah,” ad-Diyar newspaper reported on Monday.

France has presented a new proposal regarding the border conflict with Israel to caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, al-Akhbar newspaper said monday.

Mikati had met Friday in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron who told him that France would do "everything in its power" to stop violence spiralling between Lebanon and Israel.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea has stressed that “the state will not be built as long as the defiance camp led by Hezbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement is present.”

“The proof is their attempt to torpedo the municipal and mayoral elections after they realized that the popular mood is no longer in their favor,” Geagea added, in an interview with the L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper.

Israeli fighter jets struck a valley between the Jezzine district towns of al-Aishiyeh and al-Mahmoudiyeh, where an Israeli drone had been shot down overnight.

Hezbollah meanwhile targeted groups of soldiers in the Hanita and Dhaira posts in northern Israel and surveillance equipment facing al-Wazzani.

Terry Anderson, the globe-trotting Associated Press correspondent who became one of America's longest-held hostages after he was snatched from a street in war-torn Lebanon in 1985 and held for nearly seven years, has died at 76.

Anderson, who chronicled his abduction and torturous imprisonment by Islamic militants in his best-selling 1993 memoir "Den of Lions," died on Sunday at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.

Hezbollah on Sunday announced an attack on a building used by Israeli troops in the Israeli settlement of Shomera in response to Israeli attacks on civilian homes in the south.

It also attacked and "destroyed" newly-installed surveillance equipment at the Dovev Israeli post.

French President Emmanuel Macron has told caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati that France would do "everything in its power" to stop violence spiralling between Lebanon and Israel, his office said.

Macron told Mikati in Paris that he would "continue to act for Lebanon's stability" to protect it from escalating tensions in the Middle East.

Contacts are ongoing with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent him from executing his threat to launch a broad war on Lebanon, a diplomatic source said.

“Netanyahu has told the leaders of world powers, most notably the U.S., Russia and France, that he wants to discipline Hezbollah,” the source added, in remarks to the Nidaa al-Watan newspaper.