Hamas militants on Monday fired 16 rockets from south Lebanon towards northern Israel, the Palestinian group's armed wing announced, saying they targeted areas south of the Israeli coastal city of Haifa.

The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said the strikes came "in response to the occupation's (Israel's) massacres and its aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip."

Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh will arrive in Beirut within days, following his visit Sunday to Iran and his meeting with its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, media report said.

A highly informed source meanwhile told the Nidaa al-Watan newspaper that former General Security chief Abbas Ibrahim’s “presence in Qatar to take part in the ongoing negotiations over the prisoner swap file between Hamas and Israel is direct intervention by Hezbollah in this file.”

Israel shelled Monday the outskirts of the southern border towns of Alma al-Shaab, al-Naqoura, and al-Khiyam.

Meanwhile, Israeli residents near Lebanon's border have been asked to stay home over a suspected security incident.

Students in Lebanon observed Monday a moment of silence for Rimas, Taline and Layan, ages 10, 12 and 14, and their grandmother who were killed Sunday evening by an Israeli airstrike in the southern town of Ainata.

The death of the three children and their grandmother raised the number of civilians killed on the Lebanese side in the border clashes between Hezbollah and Israel to at least 14, despite Hezbollah's warning that if Israel kills Lebanese civilians, it will be considered a violation of the rules of engagement and it will retaliate by attacking civilian targets.

All the ongoing military developments and diplomatic efforts do not indicate that there will be any imminent agreement on a ceasefire in Gaza or on Lebanon’s southern front, informed political sources said.

Such an agreement will not be reached before the emergency Arab summit that will be held in Riyadh on November 11, the sources added, in remarks to al-Joumhouria newspaper published Monday.

The British Foreign Office said on Monday it was pulling out some of its embassy staff from Lebanon over fears that Israel's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip could widen into the region.

"Events in Lebanon are fast moving. The situation has potential to deteriorate quickly and with no warning," the Foreign Office said in updated travel advice for Lebanon.

The U.S. administration has warned Iran and Hezbollah that it is ready to intervene against them if they attack Israel, a media report said on Monday.

"The Biden administration has … sent messages to Iran and Hezbollah, through regional partners including Turkey, that the United States would be prepared to intervene militarily against them if they launched attacks against Israel," the New York Times quoted officials as saying.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Monday said he strongly condemns “this genocidal, destructive and displacement war against the Palestinian people.”

“We express solidarity with them, defend their cause, support the two-state solution and call on the international community to work on stopping this war,” the patriarch added.

Nestled in the mountains of northern Lebanon, a museum dedicated to Kahlil Gibran in his hometown of Bsharre has been celebrating the centennial of "The Prophet", the renowned author's most famous work.

Since it was first published in the United States in 1923, millions of copies of "The Prophet" have been sold worldwide, with the book becoming a literary classic that has been translated into dozens of languages from the original English.

Hezbollah on Sunday said it fired rockets at Israel’s north in response to the killing of Lebanese civilians in an Israeli drone strike earlier in the day.

“In response to the brutal and ugly crime that the Zionist enemy committed this afternoon by targeting a civilian car on the al-Maaysra road between Ainata and Aitaroun, which resulted in the martyrdom of a woman and her three toddler grandchildren, the jihadi fighters of the Islamic Resistance shelled the Kiryat Shmona settlement with several Katyusha rockets,” Hezbollah said in a statement.