The French Foreign Ministry has given its "unwavering" support for both “Israel’s security and Lebanon's stability and sovereignty" after Israel responded with strikes to rockets launched from positions inside Lebanon.
The Israeli military said its war planes hit 10 targets on Friday including tunnels and weapons-making sites belonging to the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
The attacks were a response, it said, to a series of rockets fired from Lebanon into northern Israel on Thursday, which it blamed on Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.
Israeli-Palestinian tensions are running high following two nights of raids by Israeli police at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest site, earlier this week.
Police beat Palestinian worshippers, arresting and removing hundreds of people from the compound in what they said was an effort to remove agitators holed up in the mosque.
The action drew condemnation across the Arab world.
On Friday, Paris called on "all parties to show maximum restraint and avoid any action liable to lead to an escalation," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Francois Delmas.
He reiterated France's "strong condemnation of the indiscriminate rocket fire that targeted Israeli territory from Gaza and southern Lebanon".
‘Nobody wants an escalation’
Despite militants firing rockets from Lebanon and Gaza and the Israeli air strikes, no other serious injuries were reported along the borders.
Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque passed without major incidents.
"Nobody wants an escalation right now," an Israeli army spokesman said. "Quiet will be answered with quiet, at this stage I think, at least in the coming hours."
One official with a Palestinian militant group told Reuters news agency they were ready to keep the calm should Israel do the same, with the group having "made its point".
The West Bank has seen a surge of confrontations in recent months, with near-daily military raids and escalating settler violence amid a spate of attacks by Palestinians.
With the international-led peace process in tatters, Palestinians' hopes of creating an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, have faded.
Israel’s new hard-right government is set on expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank and includes members who rule out a Palestinian state. Hamas for its part spurns coexistence with Israel.
Over the past year, Israeli forces have made thousands of arrests in the West Bank and killed more than 250 Palestinians, including fighters and civilians.
More than 40 Israelis and three Ukrainians have died in Palestinian attacks in the same period.
(with wires)
