Two Syrian nationals were kidnapped on Monday on the Beirut airport road as the abductors demanded the family to pay a $5,000 ransom in exchange for their release.

The National News Agency reported that Abdul Baset Dallah and Abdo Dallah informed the Ozai police station that their nephews Attef Dallah, 25, and his brother Abdul Latif, 40, were kidnapped.

The trial of four Hizbullah members indicted in ex-Premier Rafik Hariri’s Feb. 2005 assassination will be held late 2012 or early next year, Special Tribunal for Lebanon sources told the Kuwaiti daily al-Rai on Monday.

“The trial of the accused in former PM Rafik Hariri’s murder whether in their presence or in absentia will start between the end of this year and March of next year,” the sources said.

The Lebanese army filed a complaint with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) against a Spanish officer who crossed the barbed wire and met with Israeli troops.

According to the complaint, the army considered the incident a violation of Lebanese sovereignty.

A senior Israeli military officer has warned that the Jewish state would launch a ferocious war on Lebanon if Hizbullah retaliated to an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

“Despite the inevitable international outcry, Israel would be left with no choice but to lay waste to swathes of southern Lebanon because Hizbullah has entrenched itself so deeply within the civilian population,” the officer told The Telegraph.

More than 1,000 people marched in Beirut on Sunday calling for the establishment of a secular state in the country which is ruled by a system of power-sharing along religious lines.

"Secularism is the solution," and "The people demand a civil state," the crowds chanted as they marched in Beirut streets waving Lebanese flags.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat on Sunday hit back at Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun, accusing him and his allies of seeking to “take control of all the country’s assets, of the administration, judiciary, army and economy.”

Jumblat vowed to “confront them through the ballot boxes” in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

Former prime minister Saad Hariri on Sunday accused the rival March 8 camp of seeking “elections and electoral laws that are subject to the terror of weapons,” but stressed that the opposition March 14 camp’s “decision is to confront this conspiracy.”

“Elections will take place in Syria under the terror of weapons. And in Lebanon, they also want elections and electoral laws that are subject to the terror of weapons. Our decision is to confront this conspiracy against the democratic regime and the renewed attempts to subject Lebanon to the Syrian regime and its tools,” Hariri said in a speech via video link to a rally held by the Mustaqbal Movement in downtown Beirut to commemorate Martyrs Day and the May 7, 2008 events.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Sunday said the Lebanese “must not stand idly by concerning the events in the Arab countries,” but stressed that their role must not involve promoting violence in the countries of the Arab Spring.

“We hope the Arab world will achieve the so-called Arab Spring and will meet the needs of the people at the political level and in terms of economic and social reforms,” al-Rahi said in Montreal, where he arrived on Saturday for a pastoral visit.

Forty towns across Lebanon on Sunday witnessed municipal by-elections to choose 37 new municipal councils in a process that Interior Minister Marwan Charbel said took place in a democratic manner.

Polling stations closed at 7:00 PM.

Two people were killed on Saturday in a shooting between security forces and a wanted drug smuggler in al-Hermel in the Bekaa, announced the security forces in a statement.

It said that the suspect, Hassan A., opened fire at an anti-drug police patrol when it became suspicious of the vehicle he was driving in.