During the first five days, Israeli forces would pull out from the western sector, spanning from Ras al-Naqoura to Rmeish. The next five days would see a withdrawal from the central sector, covering Rmeish to Mays al-Jabal.

With the deadline looming for the terms of a fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah to be met, an American diplomat on Monday said “much progress” had been made recently.

It is the second such pullout since a Nov 27 ceasefire, and came after United Nations peacekeepers and Lebanon’s prime minister late last month called on the Israeli army to speed up its withdrawal from Lebanon’s south.

Lebanon is geared to select a new president this week as the army has made significant strides in taking over for IDF troops deployed in southern Lebanon

The Biden administration in its final days is shifting more than $100 million in military aid from Israel and Egypt to Lebanon as it tries to bolster a ceasefire agreement it helped mediate between Israel and Hezbollah.

Israel and Hezbollah agreed to pull their forces out of southern Lebanon before the end of January. The area will then be secured by the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers, as part of the agreed conditions of the ceasefire.

U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein said during the latest meeting of the ceasefire monitoring committee that Israel would withdraw within 15 days from south Lebanon’s western, central and eastern sectors, al-Akhbar newspaper reported

An Israeli official told The Post that plans for the withdrawal of the IDF “don’t change the fact that after the ceasefire terminates, Israeli forces will need to remain in southern Lebanon.”

The Biden administration and President-elect Trump's team closely coordinated to push for Gen. Joseph Aoun to be elected as the new president of Lebanon, a U.S. official and a source familiar with the issue told U.

The Israeli military confirmed Friday morning that Hamas hostage Hamza Alzayadni was killed in Gaza, days after it had announced his father's body had been retrieved along with unidentified remains from a tunnel in Gaza.

Lebanese politicians elected army chief Joseph Aoun as president on Thursday, ending a more than two-year vacancy in a step towards lifting the war-battered country out of financial crisis.