U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein said Monday that a diplomatic solution is key to ending nearly five months of intensifying hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel.

Hezbollah's deputy chief Naim Qassem reiterated Monday that the group, which says it is acting support of Gazans and Hamas, would stop its attacks on Israel once the Gaza offensive ends.

Violence on the Israel-Lebanon border began a day after Hamas's October 7 attack that triggered the ongoing war in Gaza.

Hezbollah central council member Sheikh Nabil Qaouq on Monday said that Hezbollah will continue its military operations against the Israeli army “in support of Gaza and to protect our people and country.”

Israeli medics said one foreign worker was killed Monday and at least seven wounded in a missile strike near the Lebanese border, the latest casualties in months of cross-border fire.

An anti-tank missile hit "foreign workers who were working in a plantation", killing one man and wounding at least seven others, including two in serious condition, the Magen David Adom emergency response service said in a statement.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea said he refuses sacrificing Lebanon for the sake of Iran, as Hezbollah and Israeli forces traded fire along the border for the fifth month.

"We do not and will not accept giving up one grain of Lebanese soil to anyone, but at the same time we do not accept that southern Lebanon, for example, be sacrificed and the country be dragged into a major war for the sake of Iran’s policies in the region," Geagea told the Kuwaiti al-Rai newspaper, in remarks published Monday.

U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein arrived Monday in Beirut for meetings with senior Lebanese officials over "areas of mutual and regional concern," the U.S. Embassy in Beirut said.

Media reports had said that Hochstein would visit Israel on Monday before moving to Beirut for talks over a solution for the border conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

Hezbollah repelled overnight two Israeli infiltration attempts from north Israel into south Lebanon.

The group said it targeted two Israeli forces with explosives, artillery shells and missiles as they attempted to infiltrate into Lebanese territory from Kherbet Zar'it and Wadi Qatmoun facing the southern border towns of Ramia and Rmeish.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Sunday said “no one should drag our country into war, killing, destruction, displacement and homelessness, for no use and for issues that the Lebanese in general and our people in the Lebanese south have nothing to do with.”

Al-Rahi’s remarks, in his Sunday Mass sermon, were an apparent jab at Hezbollah, which had activated Lebanon’s southern front against Israel a day after Hamas launched its unprecedented Oct. 7 attack on south Israel.

An Israeli drone strike on a car in the southern coastal border town of Naqoura killed three Hezbollah fighters on Saturday morning, shortly after Hezbollah claimed a suicide drone attack on an Israeli command base in Liman, around seven kilometers from Lebanon's border.

Army Commander General Joseph Aoun on Friday traveled to Italy at an invitation from his Italian counterpart Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, the army said.