Live: Ex-Israeli defence minister says north Gaza being ethnically cleansed

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz want Israel's military chief of staff Herzi Halevi to step down by the end of the 60-day Lebanon ceasefire agreement, according to Kan public broadcaster. 

Netanyahu and Katz want Halevi to step down over the 7 October Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel, the report said. 

Women and children are scavenging for food among mounds of trash in parts of the Gaza Strip, a UN official said on Friday. 

Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN Human Rights office for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, expressed concern for the rising level of hunger in Gaza. 

"I was particularly alarmed by the prevalence of hunger," Sunghay said. "Acquiring basic necessities has become a daily, dreadful struggle for survival."

Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem said on Friday that the group would coordinate at a "high level" with the Lebanese army to implement the terms of a ceasefire with Israel that began two days earlier.

"The coordination between the resistance and the Lebanese army will be at a high level to implement the commitments of the agreement," Qassem said, adding that "no one is betting on problems or disagreements" with the army.

Saudi Arabia has abandoned its call for a defence treaty with the US in return for normalising relations with Israel, according to a Reuters report on Friday.

Riyadh gave up its demand after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took a more ironclad position on the creation of a Palestinian state in exchange for normalising ties with Israel. 

The kingdom had previously said it would need to see a public commitment from Israel towards a Palestinian state. It has now called for the concrete creation of a state. 

Now, Saudi Arabia and the US are discussing expanding joint military exercises and drills rather than a defence pact. 

Naim Qassem, the head of Hezbollah, has said the group had scored a victory bigger than in its 2006 war with Israel, in his first televised remarks since a ceasefire went into effect on Wednesday. 

Speaking on Friday, Qassem said Hezbollah had achieved a "divine victory". 

The death toll from Israel's strikes on Beit Lahia in northern Gaza has jumped to 75 people, the Palestinian civil defence told Al Jazeera on Friday. 

Palestinian health officials say Israel is preventing first responders from arriving at the site of the attack.

At least 70 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes on Beit Lahia in the Gaza Strip, according to Arabic media reports on Friday. 

Citing medical sources, Al Jazeera said at least 70 Palestinians, mainly women and children, have been killed in two seperate Israeli strikes. 

The Israeli army is preventing ambulances and first responders from reaching the site of the attacks, Al Jazeera Arabic reported. 

The Israeli army said that four soldiers were wounded in the bus shooting incident near the illegal settlement of Ariel in the occupied West Bank.

Hamas' armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, claimed responsibility for the attack.

When Hezbollah’s late secretary general, Hasan Nasrallah, was killed by 10 bunker-busting bombs dropped on a bunker 60 feet below ground, there was jubilation on the streets of Israel. 

"Oh Nasrallah, we’ll take you down, God willing, and send you back to God along with all of Hezbollah," were the lyrics of a song  blasted from one apartment building in Tel Aviv. 

A lifeguard announced to swimmers: "With happiness, joy and cheer, we announce officially that the rat Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated yesterday. The people of Israel live." And in common with received wisdom at the time, The Spectator proclaimed: "Nasrallah is dead and Hezbollah is broken." 

Only two months later, the mood in Israel is very different. Just 11 days ago, the defence minister, Israel Katz, said that the goal was to disarm Hezbollah and create a buffer zone in south Lebanon.

The army secured neither and the Israelis knew it.

READ MORE: After Lebanon ceasefire, Netanyahu is running out of cards to play

The chief of Hezbollah is due to give a speech Friday, the Lebanese militant group said, his first since the start of a ceasefire with Israel two days earlier.

The Lebanese group announced in a statement "a speech by the secretary general of Hezbollah Sheikh Naim Qassem today", without specifying the time.

With Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu framing the ceasefire with Hezbollah as a strategic move to pivot towards Iran’s nuclear threat, some in Tehran are bracing for an increased military threat to the country.

Several conservative Iranian voices have raised concerns that easing tensions on Israel’s northern front could embolden Iran's arch-enemy in the region. Officially, however, Iran has hailed the cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon as a victory for the Lebanese group.

"When the Israeli regime declares Iran as the primary target of the ceasefire in Lebanon, it means we will inevitably face them, whether we want to or not," a conservative analyst close to the Iranian establishment told Middle East Eye.

The analyst said that as Israel shifts its focus away from the northern front, it will have greater capacity to regroup, concentrate on neutralising the Gaza front and potentially push the US towards a more aggressive stance on Iran's nuclear facilities.

READ MORE: Why Iranian conservatives are against the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire

Hamas' military wing, the Qassam Brigades, have claimed responsibility for a shooting near the illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel in the occupied West Bank.

"One of our [fighters] surprised a number of Zionist soldiers inside a bus in Ariel, wounding 9, 3 of them critically," the group said in a statement.

"All the decisions written in the ink of the extremist Zionist government, which target the West Bank, will be paid for with the blood spilled from the bodies of soldiers and settlers in all the governorates of the West Bank, God willing."

The man who carried out the attack was Samer Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, a 46-year-old from the village of Einbus, according to the Qassam Brigades.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi on Friday denounced recent rebel attacks in Syria as "a US-Zionist plan following the Zionist regime's defeat in Lebanon and Palestine", Iran's state media reported.

In a phone call with his Syrian counterpart, Araqchi reiterated Iran's support to the Syrian government, the media said.

A shooting at a bus near the illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel injured at least eight people on Friday in the occupied West Bank, an Israeli rescue service said.

Local sources and eyewitnesses told Wafa that Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian man in the south of the village of Harris after he allegedly attacked a bus carrying settlers.

At least 24 Israelis, including soldiers, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military raids in the West Bank since 7 October, according to Israeli official figures.

During the same period, at least 747 Palestinians have been killed in the territory by Israeli military or settlers, according to an AFP count based on Palestinian official figures.

All of Israel's settlements in the West Bank are considered illegal under international law.

Lebanon is taking a cautious sigh of relief but the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel stands on shaky ground.

While fighting may be over - or at least paused - attention now shifts to another challenge facing Lebanon and Hezbollah: internal reckoning.

While Hezbollah’s supporters, along with other segments of the Lebanese population, see the war’s outcome as a victory for the party, others have decried the bloodshed and destruction caused by a conflict they did not back.

“Hezbollah’s claim of victory holds little weight outside its core constituency,” Imad Salamey, a Middle Eastern politics expert at the Lebanese American University, told Middle East Eye.

“The war was not widely popular among the Lebanese people, many of whom are more focused on the devastating economic losses inflicted during the conflict.”

Read more: What is next for Hezbollah in Lebanon?