China’s ambassador to the U.N., Li Baodong, has stressed that investigations carried out by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in ex-Premier Rafik Hariri’s Feb. 2005 assassination should be “objective and transparent.”

Li made the comment in response to a question by An Nahar daily during a press conference he held in New York on Wednesday.

Russia on Tuesday called for the U.N. Security Council to carry out a mission to the Middle East, including Lebanon and Egypt.

The Security Council has not visited the troubled region for more than three decades. Russia's U.N. ambassador Vitaly Churkin said council envoys should go to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon.

Lebanon filed a complaint with the U.N. Security Council on Saturday over an Israeli device found in south Lebanon to spy on Hizbullah’s private telecommunications network.

Hizbullah said Friday that it discovered the device which exploded after apparently being detonated remotely by the Israelis near the village of Majdel Selem, about 8 kilometers from the border with Israel.

The Lebanese government is increasingly "subordinate" to Iran and Syria, who have been helping Hizbullah rearm, a top U.S. lawmaker told U.N. special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen.

Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the diplomat on Tuesday that she was "concerned" U.S. and U.N. efforts in Lebanon were failing to counter Hizbullah's growing power.

The United States on Thursday accused Syria and Iran of fuelling tensions in Lebanon with illicit arms supplies, which a top U.N. envoy warned was part of a "hurricane blowing up" in the Middle East.

New fears about Lebanon, where the government faces mounting pressure from Hizbullah, were raised at closed U.N. Security Council consultations in which the U.N. leadership again called for the disarming of "Hizbullah and other militias."

Terje Roed-Larsen, U.N. Special Envoy for the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1559, said Thursday that Lebanon is in a "hyper-dangerous" state because of the "heavily armed militias" operating in it.

The envoy, Terje Roed Larsen, called for urgent efforts to disarm groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon, warning that there is "a hurricane blowing up" in the Middle East.

Israel hailed the U.N. Security Council's decision on Wednesday to slap a fourth set of punitive sanctions on Iran but said more must be done to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

"It's an important step in the right direction, but the new sanctions are not sufficient," Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom told public radio.

Cabinet clearly believed that 50/50 was the fair way to get with less fuss over the issue of voting against or abstain from voting for new U.N. Security Council sanctions on Iran.

So a decision not to side with either political camp was taken after Cabinet ministers were equally divided between voting against the U.N. proposal and abstaining from the vote.