Hezbollah forces and the Syrian army units kicked off fresh military operations to seize back a strategic town in Zabadani in Damascus countryside on Saturday.

Hezbollah forces and the Syrian army units kicked off fresh military operations to seize back a strategic town in Zabadani in Damascus countryside on Saturday, after the 48-hour ceasefire with the terrorist groups ended earlier today.

The ceasefire came into effect on Thursday and included, besides Zabadani in rural Damascus, two villages to the northwest of the country, Kefraya and Foua, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Saturday.

It had been extended late on Friday but had collapsed by the morning.

The Syrian army and the Lebanese Resistance forces started their operations to take control of al-Mazaya town in the Southern parts of the Zabadani city.

Local ceasefires in Syria's four-year conflict have tended to be fragile, and UN attempts to forge larger truces in other parts of the country, such as in the northern city of Aleppo, have come to nothing.

Zabadani has been the center of a wide military campaign launched by Hezbollah and the Syrian army against takfiri groups.