U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday he expected the Israeli and Lebanese leaders to meet with him over the next couple of weeks and voiced hope for a permanent peace deal this year.

"I think there's a very good chance of having peace. I think it should be an easy one," Trump told reporters as he met the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors to announce an extension of a shaky ceasefire.

The Israeli army targeted Friday the southern villages of Touline and Kherbet Selem despite residents returning home to their southern towns and villages after a 3-week extension of the ceasefire.

Israeli troops were also detonating houses in Khiam, a border town in a "buffer zone" that Israel is occupying in southern Lebanon.

Saudi envoy Yazid bin Farhan met again Thursday evening with Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, without media coverage, to discuss the details of implementing the Taif Agreement in its entirety, without any procrastination, LBCI television reported.

Tonight's second round of preparatory direct talks between Lebanon and Israel will be held at the White House instead of the State Department, Lebanese TV networks said.

The meeting is scheduled for 11:00 pm Beirut time (8:00 pm GMT).

An Israeli strike on southern Lebanon killed three people on Thursday, the Lebanese health ministry said, the latest attack despite a 10-day truce in the Israel-Hezbollah war.

In a statement, the ministry said that "an Israeli airstrike on the Shoukine road in the Nabatieh district," more than 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of Israel, killed three people while artillery shelling of the village of Yater wounded two people, including a child.

Lebanon's leaders accused Israel on Thursday of committing a war crime, after an airstrike killed a Lebanese journalist in the country's south, with the Israeli army saying it was reviewing the incident.

Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan held talks on Thursday, discussing the latest developments in Lebanon and the region, "particularly Israel's continued aggression against Lebanon, including its ongoing systematic destruction of border villages," Berri's office said.

Free Patriotic Movement leader Jebran Bassil suggested Thursday that Hezbollah "has lost its internal legitimacy" and "its justification for

The United Nations said Thursday it was "working on" maintaining a presence in Lebanon once the mandate for its UNIFIL peacekeeping force expires at the end of the year.

"In terms of the post-UNIFIL, we're currently in the process of working on these options," said Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, with the Lebanese government "very clear that they would want to keep a U.N. presence".

Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has urged the Trump administration to pressure Israel to scale back its demands and end its military invasion of the country.