Gulf state leaders have fended off an Iranian-led attempt to call for arming the Palestinians and severing all diplomatic ties with Israel at an extraordinary summit in Riyadh, in a effort to retain control of the region’s diplomatic response to the Israeli assault on Gaza.

Tehran, however, insisted on Sunday that its influence remained through its allied “resistance factions” operating in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. In a further sign that it has no intention of jettisoning a military path, militants near the Israeli border with Lebanon fired anti-tank missiles towards Israel, hitting a number of civilians, according to the Israeli military.

An Israeli ambulance service spokesperson told Israel’s N12 News that one person had been critically injured and between three to five others wounded. Footage showed cars on fire on a road near an open area.

The secretary general of Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah group, Hassan Nasrallah, said on Saturday that the front against Israel would remain active, a declaration that in turn drew a warning from Israel to the Shia group not to escalate fighting.

Nearly 1,500 Hezbollah fighters in the ranks of the Syrian regime’s army have been withdrawn to strengthen the group’s frontline in Lebanon. The political and militant group is Iran’s most prominent proxy movement.

The head of Hezbollah’s executive council, Hashem Safieddine, said on Sunday: “The occupying regime [Israel] is delusional and mistaken if it believes that it can eliminate the Hamas movement or other resistance factions. The resistance front has developed both in terms of presence and strength.”

The relatively tepid outcome of the Riyadh summit, attended by 51 leaders in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), left some disappointed, but others insisting the moral force of the unified support for Palestine shown by the Islamic world would force the US to rein in Israel.

The refusal of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to engage with US proposals for a long humanitarian pause and longer-term solution, including a future role for the Palestinian Authority, has angered the Biden administration.

In an unprecedented diplomatic push by Iran to force the Gulf monarchies to adopt a more interventionist approach, the country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, travelled to Riyadh on Saturday, the first Iranian leader to do so in 11 years, in an effort to persuade the Gulf states to take a tougher approach and explicitly back Hamas.

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