Agriculture Minister Abbas Mortada on Monday urged Lebanon’s farmers and citizens to grow their “own gardens if the crisis of the novel coronavirus drags on.”

Cheering erupted from balconies and windows in Lebanon on Sunday evening, as the country's citizens celebrated their "heroic" medical workers battling the coronavirus pandemic.

MP Ziad Aswad of the Free Patriotic Movement-led Strong Lebanon bloc on Sunday slammed calls for bringing home Lebanese expats amid the coronavirus crisis as a farce.

“More than four weeks into the anti-coronavirus measures, specifically abroad, and after everyone has coped with them and is taking precautions where they are inside Lebanon, the calls and threats for opening the borders cannot but have another reason that has nothing to do with the diaspora,” Aswad tweeted.

An army patrol came under gunfire Sunday during a raid to arrest fugitives from “the M. family” in the Baalbek district town of Maqneh, the National News Agency said.

“This prompted the patrol’s members to respond in kind, which resulted in the wounding in the leg of A.A.M. before he was arrested with another person,” NNA added.

A Lebanese Army helicopter has flown to Egypt and returned ten Lebanese officers and a non-commissioned officer to Lebanon amid the coronavirus pandemic, the army said on Sunday.

The military noted that the eleven personnel had been on a training mission.

It has been confirmed that the government will approve a mechanism for bringing home expats during Tuesday’s cabinet session, after Speaker Nabih Berri threatened to suspend his ministers’ participation in Hassan Diab’s administration, media reports said.

“After Berri escalated his stance against the government over its reluctance to bring back the Lebanese who want to return from abroad, the government responded by distributing invitations to ministers to hold a cabinet session Tuesday afternoon to discuss the suggestions related to the return of the Lebanese from abroad,” An-Nahar newspaper reported on Sunday.

Armored vehicles in the streets, hundreds arrested, smartphone surveillance -- sweeping measures to fight the coronavirus have raised concerns in the Middle East over the erosion of already threatened human rights.

As the world battles the COVID-19 pandemic, more than three billion people are now living under lockdown and, in some cases, strict surveillance.

Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Saturday that the right of Lebanese stuck abroad to return home should not be subject to debate, as the country grapples with the novel coronavirus pandemic that killed six so far and infected 412.

Security forces on Saturday removed all the tents that protesters erected in Beirut’s Martyr Square and Riad al-Solh since Lebanon’s uprising on October 17.

The Health Ministry said on Saturday that one more death and 21 new cases of coronavirus have been detected on Saturday.

The Ministry said an elderly in his 80s has died as the result of the virus and that he already had other chronic diseases. His death raises the number of victims to eight.