Saudi Arabia has asked French authorities to freeze the delivery of weapons to the Lebanese army under a Saudi grant, As Safir daily reported on Thursday.

The newspaper quoted informed French sources as saying that Paris received an official message from Riyadh in May asking it to freeze the delivery of the rest of the arms.

The United Nations was scrambling Wednesday to get Yemen peace talks in Geneva moving with both the exiled government and the Iran-backed Yemeni rebels accusing each other of trying to sabotage the process.

The third day of the high stakes talks, launched by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with an appeal for a badly-needed two-week humanitarian truce, also stumbled over the makeup of the different delegations.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Saudi Arabia's defense minister this week in a meeting aimed at boosting bilateral ties after years of tensions over Syria, his aide said Wednesday.

Putin will meet Prince Mohammed bin Salman, believed to be a favored son of King Salman, on Thursday on the sidelines of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Kremlin's top foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov said.

The deputy foreign minister of Iran, whose country is accused of siding with rebels in Yemen, said Tuesday that Tehran will support the outcome of this week's U.N. peace talks.

"We back the Yemeni-Yemeni dialogue in Geneva... and we will support the outcome of the dialogue", Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told reporters at an extraordinary meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), in the Saudi Red Sea city of Jeddah.

Saudi Arabia beheaded two of its citizens for murder Tuesday, adding to what a rights group calls a "campaign of death" in which more than 100 people have been executed.

Mohammed al-Otaibi was convicted of shooting dead another Saudi, the interior ministry said in a statement on the official Saudi Press Agency.

Iran-backed Yemeni rebels on Tuesday accused Saudi Arabia of trying to sabotage U.N. peace talks in Geneva and ruled out negotiations with the internationally recognized exiled government, saying it lacked legitimacy.

The rebels were finally set to join talks on Tuesday afternoon as they arrived a day late after being stranded in Djibouti -- a fact they blamed on Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia on Monday beheaded a Syrian drug trafficker and a national convicted of murder, taking to 100 the number of executions in the kingdom this year.

The number of executions has surged in 2015 compared with the 87 recorded by AFP for all of last year. But it is still far below the record 192 which rights group Amnesty International said took place in 1995.

A senior Iranian official arrived in Saudi Arabia Monday for talks on the Yemen conflict that has seen a Riyadh-led coalition carry out air strikes on Iran-backed rebels, Tehran said.

Deputy foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian will attend a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation as U.N.-sponsored peace talks between rival Yemeni factions are set to get under way in Geneva, the ministry said.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon on Monday called for an immediate humanitarian truce in Yemen as peace talks began in Geneva and a Saudi-led Arab coalition continued aerial bombardments of the ravaged country.

Global powers are keen for a speedy resolution of the conflict, fearing the growing power of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemeni branch of the jihadist network which has taken advantage of the chaos to seize territory.

A delegation of Yemeni rebels headed Sunday for U.N.-sponsored peace talks in Geneva as their forces gained ground by seizing a provincial capital near the border with Saudi Arabia.

After repeatedly delaying their departure, the delegation left from the capital Sanaa aboard a U.N. plane for the Swiss city, where the talks are due to start on Monday, a day late.