In Lebanon's biggest public hospital, nurses are busy honing their life-saving skills as the specter of all-out war looms, 10 months into intensifying clashes between Hezbollah and Israel over the Gaza war.

"We are in a state of readying for war," nurse Basima Khashfi said as she gave emergency training to young nurses and other staff at the hospital in Beirut.

German airline giant Lufthansa said Friday it was extending a suspension of flights to Beirut until September 30 and to Tel Aviv and Tehran until September 2 with regional tensions still high.

Previously suspended services to Amman in Jordan and Erbil in Iraq will however resume on August 27, with flights to the latter crossing a "northern corridor" of Iraqi airspace.

The evaluation until now is that Washington “is not eager for the choice of a major war,” diplomatic sources in Beirut and New York said.

“The sources however ruled out a return to calm in Gaza and Lebanon prior to the U.S. presidential election,” al-Akhbar newspaper reported on Friday.

Israel “does not want things to descend into an all-out war with Hezbollah” out of fear of “its major repercussions in light of the multiple military, political and economic crises” that the war has created for Israel over the past 10 months, a media report said.

“Several Western and Arab diplomats will visit Lebanon in a bid to urge the Lebanese government to press Hezbollah not to retaliate against Israel” over the killing of its top military chief Fouad Shukur, al-Binaa newspaper reported on Friday.

After Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel’s army is shifting its attention from Gaza to the border with Lebanon, informed military sources told Lebanon’s al-Binaa newspaper that Israel has not sent any unusual reinforcements to Lebanon’s frontier.

The Israeli military leaders “are saying that focusing on the north stands for guaranteeing symmetric responses to the resistance’s strikes, without mentioning the notion of going to a grand or all-out war,” the daily added.

Eight people, including a child and six Hezbollah fighters, were killed Friday in Israeli strikes on south Lebanon.

Two people, a seven-year-old child and a Hezbollah fighter, were killed in a drone strike on a house and a car in the southern village of Aita al-Jabal in the Nabatiyeh district, hours after a strike on Tayrharfa killed three Hezbollah fighters.

Hezbollah has provided a glimpse of its secret tunnels housing weapons -- a move experts say is a warning to Israel as the underground facilities could prove vital to the group should wider war erupt.

The Iran-backed movement has exchanged regular fire with Israel in support of its ally Hamas since the Palestinian militant group's October 7 attack on Israel sparked the Gaza war.

An Algerian oil tanker set sail Thursday for power-hungry Lebanon, official media said, with 30,000 tons of fuel destined to restart turbines in the country grappling with years of economic meltdown.

MP Marwan Hamadeh sparked panic on Wednesday by saying that an Israel-Hezbollah war would erupt within days or even “hours,” citing diplomats informed on the negotiations in the region.

A few hours later, Hamadeh appeared to downplay his own remarks, telling al-Jadeed television that his statement was “blown out of proportion” and that he based his analysis on “alarming developments on the ground that took place over the past 48 hours.”

Former General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim has ruled out an “all-out war,” despite the soaring tensions in Lebanon and the region following Israel’s assassination of Fouad Shukur in Beirut and Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

“Any potential escalation in Lebanon will be controlled,” Ibrahim said.