President Michel Aoun president has told a visiting American delegation that Beirut rejects the U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights because it includes Lebanese areas annexed by Israel.

They are a common sight around Beirut, but their presence barely registers with Lebanese citizens anymore.

Nearly 30 years after civil war guns fell silent, dozens of bullet-scarred, shell-pocked buildings are still standing — testimony to a brutal conflict that raged for 15 years and took the lives of 150,000 people.

On the eve of Sunday’s parliamentary by-elections, Prime Minister Saad Hariri visited Tripoli on Friday accompanied by former minister Ghattas Khoury in a show of support for al-Mustaqbal Movement candidate Dima Jamali.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi said “things are turning for the better” in the country and that his talks with President Michel are very “reassuring.”

Head of the Finance and Budget Committee MP Ibrahim Kanaan assured from Washington after meeting with Marshall Billingslea, the U.S. Treasury’s assistant secretary on terror financing, that “no new sanctions on Lebanese officials,” the National News Agency reported on Friday.

Health Minister Jamil Jabaq asserted that international organizations and donors have realized through his work since taking office, that he does not belong to Hizbullah although the party called him to participate in the government, the Kuwaiti al-Rai newspaper reported on Friday.

The Council of Ministers on Thursday failed to reach an agreement over a recommendation by the telecom minister to annul a 2014 decision granting postpaid cellphone subscribers 60 minutes free of charge.

Information Minister Jamal al-Jarrah told reporters that the issue was postponed for further assessment.

U.S. officials on Thursday announced that Washington has sanctioned a Lebanese network accused of laundering millions of dollars for "drug kingpins" and helping finance Hizbullah, the Iran-backed Shiite movement that Washington labels a "terrorist organization."

The U.S. Treasury Department said it has added Lebanese national Kassem Chams to its blacklist, along with two related entities: the "Chams Money Laundering Organization" and Chams Exchange, a money service business in Lebanon.

Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced Thursday that “the best decision we have taken in Lebanon is carrying out steps to address the deficit and austerity measures before the eruption of the crisis.”

“Other countries were obliged to take tougher, severer and more painful measures because they waited for the crisis to happen before beginning reforms,” Hariri said at the beginning of an ordinary Cabinet session at the Grand Serail.

Akram Kanaan looked toward an Israeli military position on a snow-capped mountain that overlooks the village of Shebaa in southern Lebanon, pointing toward the scenic area captured by Israel more than five decades ago. No matter how long it takes, he says, it will eventually return to Lebanon's sovereignty.

Like many others in this area where the borders of Lebanon, Syria and Israel meet, Kanaan — a member of Shebaa's municipal council — is angry about President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, seized from Syria in 1967 and annexed in 1981. The American president has no right to give Israel lands that belong to Syria and Lebanon, he says.