Ireland's top diplomat in a visit to Lebanon on Monday expressed his concern over the slow progress in criminal proceedings against several Lebanese men charged with the killing of an Irish peacekeeper in 2022 in the tiny Mediterranean country.

Micheál Martin, Irish foreign and defense minister, said he was "very, very concerned" about the case. He met with Irish peacekeepers in south Lebanon and with Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib and a representative of the Lebanese defense ministry.

Four Hezbollah fighters were killed Monday in south Lebanon, with the Iran-backed group announcing a retaliatory attack.

Hezbollah announced the deaths of the four fighters, two of them from al-Naqoura, "on the road to Jerusalem" -- the phrase used for fighters killed by Israel.

Hezbollah mourned Monday the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and other officials in a helicopter crash, praising him as a "protector" of anti-Israel groups in the region.

"Hezbollah in Lebanon extends its deepest condolences," the group said in a statement, adding that they knew Raisi "closely for a long time" and that he was "a strong supporter, and a staunch defender of our causes... and a protector of the resistance movements".

The head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, MP Mohammad Raad, said Sunday that his group is “reassured” over the course of its conflict with Israel.

“The resistance is escalating its operations against the Israeli enemy to a certain level in order to preserve the deterrence equation,” Raad said.

A U.S. official has told Al-Arabiya television that neither Israel nor Hezbollah wants to engage in an all-out war.

Palestinian militant group Hamas said that a "commander" was killed in an Israeli strike on an eastern district of Lebanon near the Syrian border.

For displaced south Lebanese villagers, funerals for those killed in months of cross-border clashes are a rare chance to return home and see the devastation caused by Israeli bombardment.

Hezbollah targeted Friday a logistic military base in the occupied Golan heights with 50 Katyusha rockets, in response to al-Najjariyeh strikes.

The group said in a statement it has attacked the Tznobar base in response to the killing of two civilians in a strike on al-Najjarieh, near the coastal city of Sidon.

Kataeb Party chief Sami Gemayel has accused Hezbollah of wanting to keep the Syrian refugee crisis unresolved in order to “pressure Europe and the West to free Syria of its isolation.”

“It is pressuring Lebanon to normalize relations with Syria and it is using Lebanon, the Lebanese people and the Syrian people present in Lebanon as a pressure card,” Gemayel added in a TV interview.

Former Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblat has noted that “Hezbollah is defending Lebanon,” while describing Israel as “Lebanon’s historic enemy.”

“When the war started in the south, I said that we should not get involved or that Hezbollah should not get implicated in the war, but the war started,” Jumblat said in an interview with the BBC.