Israeli forces have killed 22 people in southern Lebanon and injured more than 120 as residents try to return home, Lebanese authorities say. 

According to Lebanon’s health ministry, citizens were attacked while they were trying to enter their still-occupied towns.

Under a ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah, the Israeli military was supposed to have withdrawn by a Sunday deadline.

But on Friday, Israel said it would keep troops in the south of the country beyond the deadline.

It said Lebanese forces were not deploying quickly enough, while Lebanon said its forces cannot move into areas until Israeli troops leave.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people remain blocked from returning to northern Gaza after Israel accused Hamas of breaching a ceasefire agreement and refused to open checkpoints to allow crossings into the north.

A day after a second exchange involving four Israeli women hostages held in Gaza for 200 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, scores of stranded Palestinians waited along the main roads leading north.

Cars, trucks and rickshaws were overloaded with mattresses, food, and tents that served as shelters for over a year for those in the central and southern areas of the enclave.

“A sea of people is waiting for a signal to move back to Gaza City and the north,” said Tamer al Burai, a displaced person from Gaza City.

“This is the deal that was signed, isn’t it? Many of those people have no idea whether their houses back home are still standing. But they want to go regardless, they want to put up the tents next to the rubble of their houses, they want to feel home,” he told the Reuters news agency via a chat app.

Donald Trump has said Jordan and Egypt should take in Palestinians from war-ravaged Gaza.

The US president called on the two nations to take in people either temporarily or permanently, adding: “We should just clear out the whole thing.”

“It’s literally a demolition site, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there,” he told reporters after a call with Jordan’s King Abdullah.

The ceasefire deal – mediated by the US, Qatar and Egypt – allows for thousands of displaced Palestinians to return to their communities.

However, not long after the Israeli female soldiers were released on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would not allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza until civilian hostage Arbel Yehud was released.

Israel had reportedly demanded she be on the list of the hostages released yesterday. However, she was not included by Hamas.

It is thought she might be held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group in the Gaza Strip.

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A Hamas official told Reuters she was alive and well and would be released next Saturday.

The militant group later issued a statement blaming Israel for the delay and accusing it of stalling.

Reacting to Mr Trump’s suggestion, an official of Hamas echoed longstanding Palestinian fears about being driven permanently from their homes.

Palestinians “will not accept any offers or solutions, even if [such offers] appear to have good intentions under the guise of reconstruction, as announced in the proposals of US President Trump,” Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, told the Reuters on Sunday.

People in Belarus have started to vote in the presidential election, which is all but certain to extend the rule of Alexander Lukashenko.

The authoritarian leader is expected to win a seventh term as leader in Sunday’s election, extending his 31 years in power in Sunday’s election.

Citizens were pictured heading to the polls in the country’s capital, Minsk. A total of 6.9 million people are registered to cast their ballots before voting ends at 5pm tonight UK time.

Four opposition candidates also appear on ballots, but all are loyal to Mr Lukashenko and have praised his rule.

Yesterday Sergei Syrankov, head of the Community Party of Belarus, told Sky News’ Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett that Mr Lukashenko is fondly referred to as Bat’ka, meaning father.

Many of the actual opponents to the incumbent president are either in prison or have been exiled abroad as a result of a crackdown on dissent and free speech.

It comes after mass protests after the election in 2020 threatened his claim to the presidency as Western governments backed the opposition’s assertion that he falsified the results and stole victory from its candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

The demonstrations went on for months and led to the arrest of more than 65,000 people, many of whom are still in prison.

Ms Tsikhanouskaya, who fled Belarus under government pressure, told The Associated Press that Sunday’s election was “a senseless farce, a Lukashenko ritual”.

In preparation for this year’s election, polling stations have removed the curtains covering ballot boxes, and voters are forbidden from photographing their ballots – a response to the opposition’s call in 2020 for voters to take pictures to make it more difficult for authorities to rig the vote.

Police have also conducted large-scale drills before the election as a way to prepare for dispersing a protest.

Speaking at a press conference as he cast his own vote on Sunday, Mr Lukashenko said some of his political opponents had “chosen” to go to prison, adding that no one was preventing from speaking out in the country.

“We didn’t kick anyone out of the country,” he said, adding: “[But prison was] for people who opened their mouths too wide, to put it bluntly, those who broke the law.”

The president has repeatedly claimed that he wasn’t clinging to power at the last election and would “quietly and calmly hand it over to the new generation”.

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Since July last year, he has also pardoned more than 250 people described as political prisoners by activists.

Artyom Shraybman, a Belarus expert with the Carnegie Russia and Eurasia Centre, told Reuters that Mr Lukashenko plans to use the pardons and his election win to try and ease his total dependence on Russia and start a conversation with the West about easing sanctions.

Elon Musk made a surprise appearance at a far-right campaign event in Germany where he urged supporters to move beyond their “past guilt”.

Speaking via video link to a hall of around 4,500 Alternative for Germany (AfD) supporters in the central city of Halle, the world’s richest man said: “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”

Mr Musk caused outrage last week after making a gesture at Donald Trump’s inauguration which many compared to a Nazi salute.

At the rally on Saturday he made an apparent reference to Germany’s Nazi past, saying “children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents”.

He added: “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

Speaking in favour of the far-right party, Mr Musk told the crowd: “I’m very excited for the AfD, I think you’re really the best hope for Germany. Fight for a great future for Germany.”

It was the second time in the last two weeks Mr Musk has publicly spoken in support of the anti-immigration, anti-Islamic party, which has been labelled right-wing-extremist by German security services.

He previously hosted AfD leader Alice Weidel in an interview on X, raising concerns of election meddling.

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Tens of thousands protest against far-right

Meanwhile tens of thousands of anti-far right campaigners protested in Berlin and other German cities on Saturday.

A huge crowd at the capital city’s Brandenburg Gate sang anti-fascist songs and carried banners denouncing the AfD.

It comes after the three-party governing coalition led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz collapsed last year.

The opposition centre-right Union bloc is currently at the top of pre-election polls, followed by the AfD – but mainstream parties have declared they will not work with the far-right party.

Mr Musk’s mounting support for the AfD will likely raise further concerns about election meddling and the surging popularity of the far-right in Germany.