BEIRUT, Lebanon (AFP) — Israel rejected a push by allies for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon and vowed to keep fighting Hezbollah militants “until victory,” ahead of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expected address to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on Friday.

Israeli bombing of Iran-backed Hezbollah strongholds around Lebanon has killed hundreds of people this week, while the militant group has retaliated with rocket barrages.

The United States, France and other allies unveiled the 21-day truce on Wednesday, after President Joe Biden and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, met on the sidelines of the UNGA in New York. But Netanyahu flatly rejected the ceasefire proposal on Thursday, ordering the military to continue “fighting with full force.”

The White House expressed frustration at the rejection, saying the truce proposal had taken “a lot of care and effort.”

“We wouldn’t have made that statement, we wouldn’t have worked on that if we didn’t have reason to believe that the conversations that we were having with the Israelis in particular, were supportive of the goal there,” National Security spokesperson John Kirby said in a statement Thursday.

Macron said later it was “a mistake” for Netanyahu to refuse a ceasefire and that he would have to take “responsibility” for a regional escalation.

Meanwhile, an Israeli air strike on Friday killed five Syrian soldiers near the border with Lebanon, the official news agency SANA reported, citing a military source.

“The Israeli enemy carried out an aerial attack... on one of our military positions near Kfar Yabus on the Syrian-Lebanese border,” SANA quoted the source as saying.

The raid came a day after the Israeli army said its warplanes struck “infrastructure along the Syria-Lebanon border used by Hezbollah to transfer weapons from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon.”

Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group said its forces fired a salvo of rockets at the Israeli city of Tiberias on Friday.

In a statement, Hezbollah said it was responding to Israel’s “savage” strikes on Lebanese towns and civilians. The Israeli military said drones and projectiles had crossed its territory from Lebanon.