Army Commander General Rodolphe Haykal held an extraordinary meeting Friday with the army’s command and top officers to discuss “the developments that Lebanon and the army are going through amid the current extraordinary period, amid the Israeli enemy’s violations and attacks.”

“The army is shouldering great responsibilities on all levels, and it will face a delicate stage in which it will assume sensitive missions,” Haykal said, according to an army statement.

UNIFIL on Friday expressed its heartfelt condolences to the Lebanese Army and the families of the personnel who lost their lives in yesterday’s Israeli drone explosion in Naqoura, wishing a speedy recovery to the injured. 

U.S. envoy Tom Barrack has revealed that he had asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their latest meeting in Israel to “give Lebanon a break.”

“Give Lebanon a break, give them a whiff of tolerance and understanding. You can’t be apparently so brutal on everybody,” Barrack said he told Netanyahu, in an interview with Mario Nawfal on the X platform.

Palestinian factions in several Beirut refugee camps surrendered their weapons to the Lebanese Army on Friday, an official said, as the government disarms non-state groups.

Ramez Dimashkieh, chairman of the official Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee, told AFP that "the Palestine Liberation Organization handed over three truckloads of weapons to the Lebanese Army," including rockets and heavy weapons.

Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri seemed disappointed after a visit by an American delegation mediating the ceasefire agreement and Hezbollah disarmament between Lebanon and Israel.

Berri said the American proposal was worse than an agreement signed in May 17 under American and Israeli pressure. That peace treaty reached in 1982 never materialized.

The Israeli military expressed regret Friday after Lebanon's army reported two of its soldiers were killed when an Israeli drone that crashed in the country's south exploded.

The Lebanese Army said its personnel were inspecting the drone that had fallen in the Naqoura area on Thursday when it exploded, killing an officer and a soldier and wounding two others.

Hardline Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham has stressed that “it’s time for Hezbollah to go.”

“They are trained by Iran, they are loyal to Iran, and we’re looking for military power in Lebanon to be loyal to the Lebanese people and a good partner to the region,” Graham, who is the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said at a press conference in Tel Aviv, after meeting officials in Lebanon and Israel.

An Israeli drone strike on Friday targeted a car in the southern town of Seer al-Gharbiyeh, killing one person, the state-run National News Agency said.

Israel has kept up its strikes on Lebanon despite a November ceasefire that sought to end over a year of hostilities with Hezbollah, including two months of all-out war.

The Army Command on Friday stressed that it is “executing its missions with the highest levels of responsibility, professionalism and keenness on the country’s security and internal stability, in line with the political authority’s decisions and out of commitment to performing duties no matter the difficulties.”

The Command also called on media outlets “not to tackle the affairs of the military institution and launch speculations about its decisions,” urging them to “return to its official statements to obtain accurate information.”

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam welcomed a United Nations Security Council decision on Thursday to extend the mandate of the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon.

"I welcome the Security Council’s decision to extend the UNIFIL mandate until December 31, 2026," Salam said, thanking France and "all friendly states in this council". The decision provides for the blue helmets to withdraw from Lebanon by the end of 2027.