Hizbullah remained silent over the Free Patriotic Movement's recent proposal on the election of the president directly by the people.

Sources close to the party stressed that head of the FPM Michel Aoun didn't discuss his suggestion, which requires a constitutional amendment, with the party.

Four people were killed and another four injured at dawn Thursday when two passenger vans collided on the highway in the eastern town of Ferzol.

Witnesses told Naharnet that a green van was heading from Zahle towards Ablah when it struck another white van coming from the other direction.

At 13, Samiha left school and the home she shared with 10 people near Baalbek in eastern Lebanon to live in a tent with her new husband, a 41-year-old tradesman.

"I didn't feel anything, I didn't have a choice," she said of the marriage, arranged by her father.

A suicide attacker who hails from Tripoli has carried out a bombing in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, an operation which was met with mixed reactions by the residents of the northern city.

According to a statement issued by the Vilayet of Baghdad, which is part of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, suicide bomber Hisham al-Hajj detonated a booby-trapped car carrying 300 kilograms of explosive material in an assembly of the Shiite Muslim militia Asaib in Baghdad on the morning of Tuesday, August 26, 2014.

The patriarchs of the Orient on Wednesday strongly deplored the Arab countries and the international community's “silence” over attacks against Christians in the Middle East, calling for issuing fatwas against takfirism and for stopping any support for terrorist groups.

“It has become known that attacks against Christians are taking a dangerous turn that threatens them, especially in Egypt, Syria and Iraq where they are victims of crimes and are forced to leave (their towns),” Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi's envoy Bishop Boulos Sayyah said after a meeting of Christian clerics of the Orient in Bkirki.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi demanded MPs on Wednesday to “immediately elect a new president based on whom they think is the strongest” candidate.

"I don't have any (favored) presidential candidate and I don't nominate or exclude anyone,” al-Rahi told the diplomats of the five permanent member countries of the U.N. Security Council.

The Arab Tawhid Party announced on Wednesday that it was closing all of its offices in Syria in light of the emerging reports of a spike in clashes in predominantly Druze region of Swieda in the neighboring country, said the National News Agency.

The media office of party leader, former minister Wiam Wahhab, added that the Arab Tawhid Party will no longer carry out any activity in Syria.

A Lebanese expatriate, who was kidnapped in Nigeria, was released for ransom, reported the National News Agency on Wednesday.

It said that Saadallah al-Seqlawi was abducted some ten days ago by gunmen in Nigeria.

Prime Minister Tammam Salam criticized on Wednesday the tense political rhetoric between various political powers, saying that “they do not help Lebanon in confronting the security danger.”

He said after meeting Speaker Nabih Berri at Ain el-Tineh: “Competition among politicians is putting at risk the lives of the soldiers and policemen taken captive in Arsal.”

Two children were killed when they were struck by a vehicle in Beirut, the state-run National News Agency reported on Wednesday.

NNA said that Fatima Wehbe Hamdan was driving her car on the Beirut Airport road when she hit two-year-old Zakaria Osama al-Tufaili and Sara Abbas Wehbi, 5.