Hezbollah on Monday announced waging two attacks on Israeli posts in northern Israel as Israeli shelling and airstrikes targeted several Lebanese southern border towns.

In a statement, Hezbollah said it attacked Israeli troops near the Mattat barracks with the “appropriate weapons.”

Israel carried out several airstrikes on southern Lebanese border towns on Sunday, as Hezbollah announced a fresh attack on Israeli posts.

Hezbollah’s al-Manar televisions said an Israeli warplane fired three missiles at a house in Rab Tlatine as an Israeli drone bombed a school in al-Taybeh.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Sunday condemned “the genocidal and brutal war that is ongoing in Gaza,” while rejecting “its spread to the southern villages” in Lebanon.

“Lebanon is not a land of war but rather a land of dialogue and peace,” al-Rahi said in his Sunday Mass sermon.

The head of Hezbollah’s executive council, Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, has stressed that his party is “not the resistance that awaits the Americans and Israelis to decide its fate.”

“We are the ones who decide the fate of the South, the border and the future of this country at the level of confronting the enemy, whom we will not allow to attack Gaza undeterred,” Safieddine said.

Israeli artillery shelling targeted several Lebanese border areas on Saturday, as an Israeli airstrike wounded a cameraman from Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television.

State-run National News Agency said artillery shelling hit the Ain al-Zarqa area between the border towns of Tayr Harfa and Alma al-Shaab. Violent artillery shelling also targeted the outskirts of the border town of Deir Mimas and the Khardali Valley area.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and urged him to “avoid escalation in Lebanon,” amid continuing cross-border clashes between Israel and Hezbollah, the U.S. State Department said.

“Secretary Blinken stressed the importance of measures to prevent the conflict from expanding, including affirmative steps to de-escalate tensions in the West Bank and to avoid escalation in Lebanon,” the State Dept. said.

Israel's military says rocket fire from Lebanon has killed one of its soldiers and wounded another near the border, where violence has flared during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

The soldiers were hit during "operational activity" in the Shtula area in northern Israel, the army said in a statement.

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi agreed, during a meeting in Bkerki, that resolving the Lebanese crises starts with the election of a president.

Lebanon has been without a president since Michel Aoun's term ended in October last year, while its government has been running in a limited caretaker capacity. The head of the General Security agency retired in March without a replacement, and the central bank governor's mandate expired in July, without a clear successor.

A statement issued by caretaker PM Najib Mikati’s office has strained the relation anew between the premier and caretaker Defense Minister Maurice Slim, after the two men held a supposedly positive reconciliation meeting on Thursday.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon David Hale has called for the implementation of U.N. Resolution 1701 and for turning the tables on Iran and its proxies in the region when the war on Gaza ends.

Since the war in Gaza began, there have been near-daily clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces along the Lebanon-Israel border, with fears of an escalation to a full-scale war.