As war rages in Gaza and threatens to spread to Lebanon, Iraqi militant groups warn they are ready to enter the fray against Israel and the United States.

A field commander of the so-called Islamic Resistance in Iraq said there would be "escalation for escalation" in the event of a full-scale war in Lebanon.

Hezbollah said it fired more than 100 rockets at Israeli positions on Wednesday in retaliation for a strike that killed a senior commander in south Lebanon, the movement's second such loss in recent weeks.

Hezbollah and Speaker Nabih Berri told U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein during his latest Beirut visit that there might be “a new phase on the southern front if the Israelis stop the war and the assassinations,” describing such a phase as a “truce,” a senior Lebanese official said.

Hochstein considered this stance “encouraging, seeing as Hezbollah did not link pacification and the truce to the end of security operations in occupied Palestine, but rather to their end in Lebanon, specifically in the south,” the official told Kuwait’s al-Anbaa newspaper in remarks published Wednesday.

White House envoy Amos Hochstein is visiting Paris Wednesday to meet with Macron's Lebanon envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian, after he visited Israel and Lebanon in June.

Hochstein discussed with Lebanese politicians a cease-fire on the Lebanon-Israel border and requested via intermediaries that Hezbollah apply pressure on Hamas to accept a cease-fire and hostage-exchange proposal put forward by U.S. President Joe Biden. Hezbollah rejected the request.

One of France's biggest news channels, BFMTV, was bought by billionaire shipping magnate Rodolphe Saade after the takeover was approved by regulators.

Saade's CMA CGM Group announced the surprise buy-out of Altice Media, which owns BFMTV and the RMC radio station, in March for 1.55 billion euros ($1.66 billion).

The man charged with stabbing author Salman Rushdie has rejected a plea deal that would have shortened his state prison term but exposed him to a federal terrorism-related charge, the suspect's lawyer said.

Hadi Matar, 26, has been held without bail since the 2022 attack, in which he is accused of stabbing Rushdie more than a dozen times and blinding him in one eye as the acclaimed writer was onstage, about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.

Lebanese authorities have charged a man who opened fire on the U.S. embassy in Beirut with the crime of belonging to the Islamic State group, a judicial source said.

Last month, a Syrian man was arrested for the shooting at the embassy entrance after having been seriously injured in the attack.

Hezbollah launched dozens of rockets into northern Israel on Tuesday in retaliation for an Israeli strike that killed a civilian in the country's south.

Israel and Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, have traded near-daily cross-border fire since the Palestinian militant group's October 7 attack on Israel sparked war in the Gaza Strip.

French President Emmanuel Macron has urged Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent a "conflagration" between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, during a telephone call between the two leaders.

Macron "reiterated his serious concern over a deepening of tensions between Hezbollah and Israel... and underscored the absolute need to prevent a conflagration that would harm the interests of Lebanon as well as Israel," the French presidency said Tuesday in a statement.

The deputy leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has said the only sure path to a cease-fire on the Lebanon-Israel border is a full cease-fire in Gaza.

"If there is a cease-fire in Gaza, we will stop without any discussion," Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Qassem, said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press at the group's political office in Beirut's southern suburbs.