Hamas said it’s ready to cooperate with any effort to bring about a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, after Israel and Hezbollah reached a truce to end months of fighting.

The deal does not address the war in Gaza. International mediators have repeatedly failed to bring Israel and Hamas to a deal that would end the brutal, 13-month-long war.

An Israeli security official says Israeli forces remain in their positions hours after a ceasefire took place and will only gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon.

The official, speaking Wednesday on condition of anonymity under military briefing rules, would not say when troops would begin the withdrawal but said it would be completed during the 60-day period laid out in the ceasefire agreement.

France’s foreign minister underlined his country’s role in brokering an agreement that ended fighting between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah alongside the U.S., saying the deal wouldn’t have been possible without France’s special relationship with its former protectorate.

“It’s a success for French diplomacy and we can be proud,” said the minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, speaking hours after the ceasefire went into effect Wednesday.

The Lebanese army asked displaced people returning to southern Lebanon to avoid frontline villages and towns near the border where the Israeli military is still present until the troops withdraw, as a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah appeared to take hold.

"With the ceasefire coming into effect, the army is taking the necessary measures to complete its deployment in the south," the army said in a statement. "The army command calls on citizens to wait before returning to frontline villages and towns that Israeli enemy forces have penetrated, awaiting their withdrawal."

Some people in Israel who have been displaced by fighting with Lebanese Hezbollah say the ceasefire deal doesn’t make them feel secure enough to go home.

Some 50,000 people have been displaced from a string of cities, towns and villages along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Those communities have been pummeled by Hezbollah rocket and drone fire for 13 months, with dozens of houses damaged and in need of rebuilding or rehabilitation.

One of the most powerful Iran-backed factions in Iraq said it would continue its operations in support of Gaza despite the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire.

Iraqi militias have repeatedly launched attacks on Israel from Iraq in the nearly 14 months since the Israel-Hamas war broke out.

Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri called Wednesday for another effort to fill the country’s long-vacant presidency just hours after a ceasefire to halt hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel went into effect.

Lebanon has been without a president since October 2022, as its deeply divided parliament has been unable to elect a new head of state. The last effort to elect a president was more than a year ago.

Hezbollah has said it accepts the ceasefire proposal with Israel, but a senior official with the group said Tuesday that it had not seen the agreement in its final form.

“After reviewing the agreement signed by the enemy government, we will see if there is a match between what we stated and what was agreed upon by the Lebanese officials,” Mahmoud Qamati, deputy chair of Hezbollah’s political council, told the Al Jazeera news network.

Lebanon’s state media said Israeli strikes on Tuesday killed at least 10 people in Baalbek province the country’s east.

At least three people were killed in the southern city of Tyre when Israel bombed a Palestinian refugee camp, said Mohammed Bikai, a representative of the Fatah group in the area. He said several more people were missing and at least three children were among the wounded.

Foreign ministers from the world's leading industrialized countries threw their strong support Tuesday behind an immediate ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah but sidestepped a key question after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Israel's leader over the war in Gaza.

At the end of their two-day summit outside Rome, the Group of Seven ministers didn't refer explicitly to the Hague-based court and its arrest warrants on charges of crimes against humanity for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.