Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of developments in the Middle East.

Israel’s army has left southern Lebanese villages but remains in five positions, a Lebanese security source told Agence France-Presse (AFP), as a deadline for their withdrawal agreed to under a peace deal with Hezbollah expired.

“The Israeli army has withdrawn from all border villages except for five points, while the Lebanese army is gradually deploying due to the presence of explosives in some areas and damage to the roads,” the source told AFP.

Israeli troops pulled out from Yaroun, Maroun al-Ras, Blida, Meiss el-Jabal, Hula, Markaba, Odaisseh, Kfar Kila, and Wazzani, according to reporting from the Lebanese national news agency, which said Lebanese soldiers and UN Interim Force in Lebanon forces (Unifil) have been sent to the “liberated towns”.

The US/France brokered ceasefire deal, that came into effect on 27 November 2024, required Israeli soldiers to withdraw from southern Lebanon and for Hezbollah to move its fighters and heavy weaponry north of the Litani River, about 16 miles (25km) north of the frontier.

The original deadline was in late January but Israel and Lebanon agreed to extend it to 18 February. Both sides have exchanged accusations of violating the ceasefire agreement, which ended 14 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

“We will leave small amounts of troops deployed temporarily in five strategic points along the border in Lebanon so we can continue to defend our residents and to make sure there’s no immediate threat,” Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a military spokesperson, told reporters yesterday afternoon.

About 60 people have reportedly been killed since the truce began, two dozen of them on 26 January as Lebanese residents tried to return to border towns on the initial withdrawal deadline.

In some other developments:

• Itamar Ben-Gvir has suggested that the Egyptian government may have had a role to play in the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage. “They [Egypt] have a role in what happened on October 7,” the former national security minister, who resigned from Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet in protest over the Gaza ceasefire deal, said in comments carried by Israeli state radio. “There was probably some partnership, or at the very least, a willful blindness.”

• An alternative to Donald Trump’s proposal for the effective ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza is being prepared by Egypt, under which Hamas would be formally excluded from governance and control of the territory’s reconstruction. The process would be handed over on an interim basis to the control of a social or community support committee. No member of Hamas would sit on the committee (you can read more about the alternative plan here).

• The World Bank will release an assessment of damages to infrastructure in Gaza in coming days. It is expected to provide a fuller overview of damage done to the territory by Israeli airstrikes after an interim report in April showed it suffered $18.5bn in damages to critical infrastructure in the first four months of the war.