Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea has again criticized Hezbollah for starting a war with Israel, at the expense of the Lebanese.

"There are 22 Arab states, why is Lebanon alone paying the price of what is happening in the region," Geagea asked in a televised interview on Thursday evening, adding that Hezbollah is hijacking the state's decisions. "Hezbollah is in Lebanon but its heart is with Iran," Geagea charged.

Lebanon's national basketball team beat Angola 74-70 on Thursday to clinch a semifinal spot in the Olympic qualifying tournament that will be held in Valencia, Spain.

Omari Spellman scored 22 points and grabbed 13 rebounds. Karim Zeinoun meanwhile added 15, including a personal 7-0 run early in the fourth quarter when he turned a game that was tied at 49 into one in which Lebanon led 56-49 — and it wouldn't trail again.

Hezbollah Chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah met Friday with a delegation from Hamas headed by Khalil al Hayyeh.

Nasrallah and the delegation discussed the latest developments in Gaza and on the other "support fronts" in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, a Hezbollah statement said.

The Israeli military said Thursday its forces were "striking launch posts in southern Lebanon" after "numerous projectiles and suspicious aerial targets crossed from Lebanon into Israeli territory".

It said that most were intercepted by air defense systems but that "fires broke out in a number of areas in northern Israel" following the attacks.

Hezbollah said it launched "more than 200" rockets and a salvo of "explosive drones" at Israeli military positions Thursday, in one of its largest barrages, in response to a strike that killed a senior commander of the Iran-backed group.

A Hezbollah statement said that "as part of the response to the... assassination carried out by the enemy" in southern Lebanon's Tyre area on Wednesday, its fighters fired "more than 200 rockets of various types" at five Israeli bases across the border including in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.

Hezbollah said it fired more than 100 rockets at Israeli positions on Wednesday in retaliation for a strike that killed a senior commander in south Lebanon, the movement's second such loss in recent weeks.

Hezbollah and Speaker Nabih Berri told U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein during his latest Beirut visit that there might be “a new phase on the southern front if the Israelis stop the war and the assassinations,” describing such a phase as a “truce,” a senior Lebanese official said.

Hochstein considered this stance “encouraging, seeing as Hezbollah did not link pacification and the truce to the end of security operations in occupied Palestine, but rather to their end in Lebanon, specifically in the south,” the official told Kuwait’s al-Anbaa newspaper in remarks published Wednesday.

White House envoy Amos Hochstein is visiting Paris Wednesday to meet with Macron's Lebanon envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian, after he visited Israel and Lebanon in June.

Hochstein discussed with Lebanese politicians a cease-fire on the Lebanon-Israel border and requested via intermediaries that Hezbollah apply pressure on Hamas to accept a cease-fire and hostage-exchange proposal put forward by U.S. President Joe Biden. Hezbollah rejected the request.

None of the main actors on the Lebanese-Israeli front actually wants a war, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said.

Arab League assistant secretary-general Hossam Zaki has noted that his recent remarks on Hezbollah have been “misinterpreted.”