Several people were wounded as clashes renewed on Friday evening between the rival Tripoli neighborhoods of Jabal Mohsen and Bab al-Tabbaneh after relative calm during the day.

And as the army deployed in Jabal Mohsen, the leaders of Bab al-Tabbaneh's fighting frontiers rejected the entry of the army to their district before the “arrest” of Arab Democratic Party secretary-general Rifaat Eid.

French Ambassador to Lebanon Patrice Paoli reiterated calls for foes in Lebanon to find a way to return to dialogue and to agree on preventing the developments in the neighboring country Syria from having a negative impact on the situation in the country.

“The battles in Qusayr don't fall in Lebanon's best interest and we are looking forward for the foes to carry out the parliamentary elections on time and to form a new cabinet,” Paoli said in comments published in the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat.

Speaker Nabih Berri has intensified his contacts with various political powers in order to garner their approval over the extension of parliament's term given their failure to agree on a parliamentary electoral law, said media reports on Friday.

An Nahar daily stated that Berri is seeking to extend the term before the end of May, while parliament's tenure ends on June 19.

Efforts to form a new government have reached a dead-end given the tense local and regional developments, reported the daily An Nahar Friday.

President Michel Suleiman and Speaker Nabih Berri's efforts have not yielded any results, while al-Joumhouria newspaper Friday said that these efforts will gain steam as soon as the disputes over the extension of parliament's term and holding the elections are resolved.

Development and Liberation bloc MPs are expected to submit their candidacies on Friday to run for the upcoming parliamentary election, media reports said.

According to An Nahar newspaper, the head of the AMAL movement Speaker Nabih Berri called on lawmakers affiliated in his bloc to file their electoral candidacies on Friday to prevent any constitutional vacuum.

The Syrian army on Thursday opened fire on a vehicle for the Lebanese joint border security force that was staging a patrol in the Wadi Khaled border town of al-Nabi Berri, state-run National News Agency reported.

The incident did not cause any casualties although it created an uproar in the region, NNA said.

Al-Mustaqbal Movement leader MP Saad Hariri on Thursday warned against the “conspiracy” targeting the northern city of Tripoli, considering that the battles aim at diverting the attention from Hizbullah's participation in the Syrian war alongside President Bashar Assad's forces.

“The ongoing killing in Tripoli aims at providing a cover for the war of Hizbullah and the Syrian regime against (Syria's border town of) al-Qusayr,” Hariri said in a released statement.

Rania sits on a blanket in the street, clutching her three children a day after they fled deadly fighting in the flashpoint Tripoli district of Bab al-Tabbaneh.

"It's our children who pay the price," she says, bouncing her wide-eyed toddler Ahmed on her lap.

Caretaker Energy Minister Jebran Bassil slammed on Thursday the distribution of electoral districts in the hybrid draft law proposed by the March 14 coalition, calling it a “second Mountain War.”

"The proposal submitted by the Lebanese Forces and al-Mustaqbal blocs is a political Mountain War if we examine the divisions of the electoral districts they suggested,” Bassil stated in a press conference he held at his residence in al-Metn's Rabieh's neighborhood.

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Miqati stressed on Thursday the need for the army to respond firmly to all security violations that are targeting the northern city of Tripoli.

He said: “There is a conspiracy to force the army out of Tripoli and leave the city as a battlefield.”