Head of the French Senate Gerard Larcher arrived in Lebanon on Thursday for talks with a number of top officials.

“We know that the region is going through very difficult circumstances and the presence of France and the French Senate alongside our Lebanese friends is a duty during dire times,” said Larcher at Beirut's Rafik Hariri International Airport.

Russia's military intervention in Syria will not save President Bashar Assad, French President Francois Hollande said Friday after an EU summit called for a political transition to a new leader.

"It is very clearly stated that Bashar cannot be the future. We must go as fast as possible to a political transition," Hollande told a press conference after the summit in Brussels.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian will stand for regional elections in northwest France in December, meaning a possible departure from the cabinet, his staff said Wednesday.

President Francois Hollande said at the start of his term in 2012 that ministers would not be allowed to juggle multiple political jobs, so Le Drian is expected to quit as defense minister if he wins the campaign in Brittany.

France on Tuesday announced a series of deals worth 10 billion euros ($11.4 billion) with Saudi Arabia, reinforcing growing ties between the two countries.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced the deals, some still to be finalized, on Twitter during a visit to Riyadh.

France's defense ministry said Monday it could not confirm whether French jihadists had been killed in air strikes on a training camp for Islamic State militants in Syria.

A source in the delegation of Prime Minister Manuel Valls, currently visiting Jordan, earlier said the strikes hausd probably killed French jihadists.

France said Sunday the escalation in violence in the Palestinian territories and Jerusalem was "extremely worrying and dangerous".

The office of President Francois Hollande said "everything must be done to calm the situation and end this cycle (of violence) which has already caused too many victims".

France said Friday it had carried out a second wave of strikes overnight on Islamic State targets in Syria and accused Russia of failing to target the group.

"Two Rafale jets dropped bombs on an IS training camp. The objectives were accomplished," Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told Europe 1 radio, adding that more attacks would follow.

France has formally proposed setting up an EU border guard corps to better secure the bloc's external borders which have been inundated by huge numbers of migrants and refugees, an EU source said Thursday.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve made the proposal to his 27 EU counterparts during talks in Luxembourg and details will be discussed at a summit in Brussels next week, the source said on condition of anonymity.

French President Francois Hollande did not suggest forming an alliance between Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces and the moderate opposition Free Syrian Army, an aide said Wednesday, contradicting comments by Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

"The president spoke of the necessary presence of the Syrian opposition around a future negotiating table. The rest is not a French idea," a member of Hollande's entourage told reporters during a visit to Strasbourg.

Volunteers and firefighters began the grueling task Monday of cleaning up French Riviera towns strewn with mud and debris, as the death toll from floods which tore through the region rose to 19.

Citizens of Britain, Italy and Portugal were among those who died when a torrential weekend downpour trapped people in garages and retirement homes in Medirteranean resort towns beloved by jet-setting tourists.