Plumes of smoke were still billowing Friday over a south Lebanon village after a deadly Israeli strike as shopkeepers swept shattered glass and vowed to stay put despite soaring cross-border violence.

Jannata had been largely spared more than eight months of clashes between Hezbollah and Israel as war rages in Gaza, but the Lebanese village was shaken by an overnight strike that officials say killed two civilians.

Senior Israeli officials said that comments by the defense minister, who rejected a French initiative to contain tensions on the Lebanese border over "hostile policies against Israel," do not reflect the government's position.

A senior Hezbollah official said the group's intensified attacks along Israel’s northern border will make it difficult for Israel to stage an all-our war on Lebanon because it knows the conflict would be costly.

The attacks are also pressuring Israel to end the war in the Gaza Strip, said Sheikh Ali Daamoush in a sermon during Friday prayers. His comments came as Iran-backed Hezbollah claimed it fired rockets into northern Israel in a third day of barrages, saying it struck several military posts including two in the towns of Metula and Misgav Am.

The Syrian branch of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group is prepared to send more forces to Lebanon in case Israel launches a full-scale war against Hezbollah, an Islamic Jihad official said.

“All Palestinian youth look forward to facing the Israeli occupation and joining Hezbollah in this resistance,” said Ismail al-Sendawi, national relations officer for the Islamic Jihad in Syria. He spoke at a ceremony in Damascus commemorating members of the group from Syria who died fighting in Lebanon over the past eight months.

The latest presidential initiative of Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil has failed to achieve any positive result, al-Akhbar newspaper quoted several sources as saying, while noting that Hezbollah is still backing Suleiman Franjieh’s nomination.

“The stance of the (Shiite) Duo has not change and he (Bassil) knows that what he is doing is an ill-timed maneuver,” the sources said.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Friday said Israel will not join a trilateral framework proposed by France to defuse tensions with Lebanon, accusing Paris of “hostile policies against Israel.”

“While the State of Israel is fighting the most just war in its history, France has shown hostility and enmity against us, while blatantly ignoring the atrocities committed by Hamas’ terrorists against children and women -- just because they are Jews,” Gallant said in a post on the X platform.

Washington communicated with caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Speaker Nabih Berri in the wake of Israel’s assassination of senior Hezbollah military commander Taleb Abdallah, a Western diplomatic source said.

The U.S. “stressed the need for restraint, advising that Hezbollah should not be dragged into a miscalculation in its response to the assassination,” the source added, in remarks to the Asharq al-Awsat newspaper.

Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil has noted that he is “not carrying out an initiative, but rather an effort to finalize the presidential juncture.”

“We agree with Speaker Nabih Berri that the priority is for consensus over a president prior to the election, which would give a success chance to the new presidential tenure, contrary to the approach of confrontation,” Bassil said at a press conference that he held to announce the outcome of his meetings.

Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin is visiting Lebanon next week, after he met at the Vatican last week with French Presidential Envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian.

Parolin and Le Drian discussed the situation in Lebanon, the presidential crisis, and the results of the Quintet's efforts, media reports said.

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Friday condemned “the continuation of the Israeli attacks on the south and the deliberate killing of its people.”

During a Cabinet session, Mikati also decried “the destruction of towns and the burning of crops,” calling on the international community to “put an end to the destructive and terrorist aggression.”