Israel has already violated the ceasefire agreement it struck with Lebanon late on Thursday, the Lebanese Army has said.

Writing on X, the army urged “citizens to exercise caution in returning to the southern villages and towns, amid a number of violations of the agreement, with several Israeli attacks recorded, in addition to intermittent shelling targeting a number of villages.”

The Israeli military has told people in Lebanon not to return to the areas of the south where its troops are still present. The area south of the Litani river has been cut off from the rest of the country after Israel bombed several bridges.

Israel has also destroyed over 1,000 homes a day in Lebanon since it escalated its attacks there early last month, according to data from the country’s National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Most of the destroyed homes were in the south, where Israeli soldiers have carried out numerous controlled demolitions of villages – which experts say could be a war crime – as part of an illegal land-grabbing operation there.

Lebanon was supposed to be included in a ceasefire deal between the US and Iran earlier this month, but Israel continued to attack its neighbouring country anyway, massacring hundreds of civilians.

Israel has announced a so-called “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon – a plan to draw a new demarcation line deeper inside Lebanese territory, effectively expanding Israel’s own borders. It says its troops will stay there despite Thursday’s ceasefire.

Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich last week confirmed plans to expand Israel’s borders in Syria, Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank, a nod to the biblically inspired ‘greater Israel’ project.

“There will be a political component in Lebanon that will extend our borders to the Litani River within defensible lines,” he said.

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