Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon Ghazanfar Rokn Abadi stressed that the Islamic republic enjoys good ties with all Lebanese factions, including the Mustaqbal movement.

He told Ad Diyar daily in remarks published on Sunday: “Some positions and statements don’t serve the historic ties between Lebanon and Iran, which we should bolster in all fields.”

A rocket fired from Gaza on Sunday hit southern Israel in what was the fourth projectile lobbed across the border since a truce took hold two days earlier, Israeli officials said.

The rocket landed near Khatzerim, a village just west of the southern desert city of Beersheva, a police spokeswoman said.

The United States and Israel are monitoring Syria's suspected arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, fearing that terror groups could take advantage of the revolt against President Bashar Assad to obtain chemical agents and long-range missiles, The Wall Street Journal reported late Friday.

Citing unnamed officials from both countries, the newspaper said U.S. intelligence services believe Syria's nonconventional weapons programs include significant stockpiles of mustard gas, VX and Sarin gas and the missile and artillery systems to deliver them.

Some 200 people protested Friday in front of the Israeli embassy in Egypt's capital demanding the ambassador's expulsion, after five Egyptian policemen were killed along the border with Israel last week.

We want "blood for blood" said one of the demonstrators, Mahmoud Ibrahim, who said he was a brother of one of the dead policemen. "We want revenge, we do not want compensation ... We want them to be punished."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Friday that the potential recognition of a Palestinian state by the United Nations should only be a "step forward" for the "full liberation" of Palestine.

His strong remarks calling for Israel's "disappearance" came as tens of thousands marched in the capital at a "Quds Day" rally, an annual regime-sanctioned demonstration in solidarity with Palestinians and against Israel, according to footage aired on state television.

China has said it will vote in favor of Palestinian statehood when the matter is presented to the U.N. Security Council next month, the official Palestinian news agency said on Friday.

A message to that effect from Chinese President Hu Jintao was delivered to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Thursday, WAFA said.

Tens of thousands of people marched in Tehran on Friday at the "Quds Day" rally, an annual regime-sanctioned demonstration in solidarity with Palestinians and against Israel, according to footage aired on state television.

The television showed large crowds in major cities, carrying banners of "Death to Israel" and "Death to America."

The March 14-led opposition rejected turning the parliament and constitutional institutions into platforms from which Hizbullah launches campaigns against the international tribunal, the coalition’s sources said.

The sources told An Nahar daily published Friday that Hizbullah was using the state institutions to defend the four suspects that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon indicted in ex-Premier Rafik Hariri’s Feb. 2005 assassination.

Israeli experts are nearing completion of an ambitious restoration of the five-century-old walls of Jerusalem, the holy city's dominant architectural feature and a unique record of its eventful and troubled history.

The $5 million undertaking, which began in 2007, is set to be complete by the end of this year. The first restoration of the walls in nearly a century, it has required decisions about which of the walls' many idiosyncrasies — the falcon nests, for example, the hundreds of machine-gun bullets, the botched restorations of years past — are flaws to be corrected, and which have earned a place in Jerusalem's story and are thus worth preserving.

Loyalty to the Resistance bloc MP Hassan Fadlallah slammed on Thursday the indictment in the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, saying that depending on telecommunications data alone as evidence is not enough in a case as sensitive as the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

He said during a press conference on the indictment’s telecommunications data: “The tribunal, its decisions, and the investigation have created a dangerous divide in Lebanon.”