A delegation of Russian officials arrived in Damascus on Tuesday for the first such visit to Syria since the fall of former President Bashar Assad.

Assad, an ally of Moscow, took refuge in Russia after his ouster in December in a lightning rebel offensive.

They walked for hours loaded with whatever clothes, food and blankets they could carry. Many smiled, some hugged loved ones they hadn't seen for months. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians filled Gaza's main coastal road as they streamed back to homes in the north.

The mood was joyous, even though many knew their homes had been destroyed in Israeli offensives against Hamas that leveled large parts of Gaza City and the surrounding north.

Hezbollah chief Sheikh Naim Qassem has announced that the ceaesfire agreement's violation by Israel "highlights Lebanon's need for the resistance," adding that so-called army-people-resistance equation is "still steadfast despite the talk of haters."

In a pre-recorded speech aired Monday, Qassem added that his group won’t accept the extension of the ceasefire deadline, without addressing the fact that the Lebanese government had already done so overnight.

Israeli authorities say they have arrested two Israeli citizens for allegedly conducting missions on behalf of Iran, the latest in a string of similar cases announced in recent months.

A statement from the Israeli police and the Shin Ben internal security agency on Monday said that Yuri Eliasfov and Georgi Andreev, residents of northern Israel, were in contact with an Iranian agent and carried out various missions under his instruction.

U.S. President Donald Trump's suggestion that Egypt and Jordan take in Palestinians from the war-ravaged Gaza Strip was met with a hard "no" Sunday from the two U.S. allies along with the Palestinians themselves, who fear Israel would never allow them to return.

Trump floated the idea on Saturday, saying he would urge the leaders of the two Arab countries to take in Gaza's now largely homeless population, so that "we just clean out that whole thing." He added that resettling most of Gaza's population of 2.3 million could be temporary or long term.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians returned to the most heavily destroyed part of the Gaza Strip on Monday as Israel lifted its closure of the north for the first time since the early weeks of the 15-month war with Hamas in accordance with a fragile ceasefire.

Massive crowds of people carrying their belongings on foot stretched along a main highway running next to the coast in a stunning reversal of the mass exodus from the north at the start of the war, which many Palestinians had feared Israel would make permanent.

The Manara settlement in northern Israel is so close to the Lebanese border that patrons of a local pub joke that Hezbollah could see if they were eating sunflower seeds or potato chips with their beers.

The proximity made Manara so vulnerable in the war between Israel and Hezbollah that rockets and explosive drones damaged the majority of homes, turning the tiny settlement into a symbol of the heavy price of fighting. The settlement's 300 residents were among the 60,000 Israelis evacuated by the government from communities along the Lebanese border during the 14-month war.

Israeli troops fired at residents of south Lebanon on Sunday, killing 22 and wounding 124, health officials said, as hundreds of people tried to return to their homes on the deadline for Israeli forces to withdraw from the area.

The dead included six women and a Lebanese army soldier, the Health Ministry said in a statement. People were reported wounded in more than a dozen villages in the border area.

The Israeli army on Sunday claimed that Hezbollah had asked residents to return to the southern border villages in defiance of Israel's warnings, after Israeli gunfire killed at least 11 Lebanese citizens and wounded 83 others.

The Israeli army said in a statement that its troops fired warning shots to “remove threats in a number of areas where suspects were identified approaching.”

The Lebanese army said Sunday that it was escorting civilians into some southern Lebanese border towns and called on residents to follow military instructions to ensure their safety, as Israeli gunfire killed at least three of the returnees and wounded 44 others.