Caretaker PM Najib Mikati met Thursday with a French delegation comprising the foreign ministry’s political affairs director, the defense ministry’s international and strategic relations director, the deputy head of the N. Africa and Mideast dept. at the foreign ministry, and the French ambassador to Lebanon.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that Washington is still exerting diplomatic efforts to resolve the border conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in a peaceful way.

The economic losses in south Lebanon have reached around $1.2 billion since the beginning of the Israel-Hezbollah clashes on October 8, a study has found.

Security forces fired tear gas on Thursday to disperse hundreds of protesters, mainly retired soldiers, who tried to break through the fence leading to the Grand Serail in downtown Beirut.

The retired members of the armed forces gathered at Beirut's Riad al-Solh Square to protest their low salaries and blocked the roads leading to the Grand Serail where Cabinet convened Thursday.

Hezbollah targeted Thursday three military posts and a command center in northern Israel as Israeli artillery shelled several border towns in south Lebanon.

Hezbollah said in a statement that it had attacked the Jalil command center in Kiryat Shmona, the Branit post, soldiers in Metula, and the Radar post in the occupied Shebaa Farms. An officer and two soldiers were wounded in the Kiryat Shmona attack, the Israeli army radio said.

Foreign diplomats have put forward proposals to bring calm to the volatile Lebanon-Israel border, in parallel with the ongoing Gaza cease-fire negotiations, according to officials Wednesday. This includes a pullback by Hezbollah from the frontier and the deployment of thousands of additional Lebanese Army troops.

The proposal put forward by European diplomats would be based on the "partial implementation" of the U.N. Security Council resolution that ended a 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, two Lebanese political officials and a Lebanese diplomat based in Europe told The Associated Press.

U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein is carrying a two-phase solution for the border conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and its implementation hinges on the halt of the war in Gaza, a prominent political source said.

The U.S. and four of its European allies hope to announce in the next few weeks a series of commitments made by Israel and Hezbollah to diffuse tensions and restore calm to the Israel-Lebanon border, two Israeli officials and a source briefed on the issue told U.S. news portal Axios.

Former Lebanese ambassador to the U.N. Nawaf Salam, whose name was once floated as a potential PM candidate, has been elected as the head of the International Court of Justice for a three-year period.

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati called Salam and congratulated him on the new post.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea has accused Hezbollah of seeking to “obtain the presidency and Lebanon’s government in return for withdrawing weapons from the border” with Israel.