Strikes hit the southern suburbs of Beirut shortly after an Israeli evacuation warning early on Friday, according to Lebanese official media and AFPTV footage.

The Israeli military has launched an investigation into the death of a 70-year-old Israeli man who entered Lebanon with Israeli forces and was killed in a Hezbollah ambush.

Investigators are trying to determine, among other things, who allowed Zeev Erlich into the combat zone with the forces and why he was permitted to enter.

Israeli strikes killed at least 51 people on Thursday in towns and villages across Lebanon, according to the country's Health Ministry.

In eastern Lebanon, intensified Israeli airstrikes killed 40 people in 10 different towns in Baalbek province, the ministry said. Rescuers were searching under the rubble of destroyed buildings, said Gov. Bachir Khodr, calling it “a very violent day” in his province.

Significant progress has been made towards a ceasefire agreement between Lebanon and Israel, but there are still some gaps to be closed, Israeli and U.S. officials told U.S. news portal Axios on Thursday.

Lebanon's health ministry said Israeli strikes on several locations in the eastern Bekaa Valley killed 22 people on Thursday, with state media reporting four family members killed in one village.

"Israeli enemy" strikes on five areas in the Baalbek region killed a total of 22 people, the ministry said in separate statements, with the National News Agency reporting that a strike on the village of Maqneh killed at least four members of the same family.

Hezbollah on Thursday claimed seven attacks on Israeli soldiers in and near south Lebanon’s Khiam, after official media said Israel troops were dynamiting homes and buildings in the town.

In seven separate statements, Hezbollah said its fighters targeted Israeli troops in and near Khiam, including with artillery, rockets and drones, as Lebanon’s National News Agency said "the enemy army" was "blowing up homes and residential buildings during its incursion into the town".

Israel’s failure to tamp down Hezbollah’s short-range rocket threat has put pressure on its government to embrace a cease-fire, the New York Times has reported.

Stuck in no man's land on the war-hit Lebanon-Syria border, cab driver Fadi Slika now scrapes a living ferrying passengers between two deep craters left by Israeli air strikes.

Hezbollah claimed a series of attacks on Israeli troops in south Lebanon and on military facilities across the border including a drone attack on the Haifa naval base, which it has repeatedly claimed strikes against.

The group also said its fighters "targeted... for the first time, the Hatzor air base" near the southern city of Ashdod, around 150 kilometers from Lebanon's southern border with Israel, "with a missile salvo".

In parallel with the meetings that U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein held in Tel Aviv on Thursday, the Israeli army command informed the political leadership that it supports a ceasefire in Lebanon.