Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri on Thursday met in Ain el-Tineh with the head of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, Waheed Jalalzada.

Hezbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement are discussing the possibility of nominating ex-minister Naji al-Bustani for the presidency instead of Suleiman Franjieh, “the current candidate of the Axis of Defiance,” the Nidaa al-Watan newspaper reported on Thursday.

Lebanon's culture minister said he has asked authorities to ban hit movie "Barbie" for purportedly "promoting homosexuality," as anti-LGBTQ rhetoric soars in one of the Arab world's more liberal countries.

"It was decided... to send a request to Lebanon's General Security agency... to take all necessary measures to ban showing this movie in Lebanon," caretaker Culture Minister Mohammed Mortada said in a statement.

The army moved a truck that had carried Hezbollah munitions from the road where it crashed to a military post early Thursday after clashes at the scene killed two people.

The truck overturned on a mountain road near the Lebanese capital in the Christian town of Kahaleh on Wednesday, on the highway that links Beirut to the eastern Bekaa Valley.

Lebanese troops detained dozens of Lebanese and Syrian traffickers in the country's north as they were preparing to send migrants on boats to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea, the army said

The military said 31 Syrians and 15 Lebanese were arrested Tuesday in several coastal towns and villages in northern Lebanon, including Minye, Salaata and Deir Am. The smugglers were getting ready to take "people through illegal ways by sea" and had prepared several boats, the army said.

A Hezbollah arms truck flipped over Wednesday on the Kahale road after which a deadly clash with residents erupted, media reports said.

TV networks said Hezbollah members opened fire in the area, killing a Kahale resident and wounding another person. One Hezbollah member was also killed in the incidents according to reports.

Brigadier General Esmail Qaani, who leads Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, has arrived in Beirut, Saudi Arabia’s Al-Hadath TV reported on Wednesday.

A veteran Lebanese Forces official has been abducted and killed in the southern town of Ain Ebel, his hometown, CCTV footage and a forensic doctor’s report said, days after reports said that the man had died in a traffic accident.

“The forensic doctor’s report says that Elias Hasrouni was strangled and hit with a gun butt on the head and on his rib cage, which resulted in the fracture of his ribs and their penetration of a lung, before the body was thrown near the car’s location,” al-Jadeed reported on Wednesday.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said that Damascus has not “intervened to resolve the crisis in Lebanon.”

France has asked the U.S. administration that French envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian make a last-ditch attempt to break the presidential impasse in Lebanon, after Lebanese leaders received the five-nation group’s “heated” message, sources informed on the French-U.S. talks said.