Speaker Nabih Berri highlighted on Monday the role the residents of the Bekaa region in eastern Lebanon have played in the country and the region over the years, saying that they have not harmed the state, but it has committed shortcomings against them.

He said before a delegation of Bekaa clans: “We discussed with political authorities, Hizbullah officials, and the army command the need for a security plan in the region even at the cost of withdrawing some soldiers in the South and deploying them in the Bekaa.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stressed on Sunday that Lebanon is a “center for resistance and perseverance against occupiers.”

He said: “Lebanon's resistance is a source of pride for the peoples of the region and all those seeking freedom and justice.”

Hizbullah's, Iranian-made, drone that penetrated Israel surveilled live images of “secret” Israeli military bases, according to Britain's Sunday Times newspaper.

The newspaper reported that the drone transmitted pictures of preparations for Israel's “biggest” joint military exercise with the U.S. army, which began last week.

Iran on Sunday scoffed at Israel's air defenses as it confirmed Tehran had provided Hizbullah with the sophisticated drone which overflew the Jewish state earlier this month.

Iran's "capabilities are very high and are at the disposal and service of Islamic nations," Defense Minister General Ahmad Vahidi said, quoted by state television when questioned on the origins of the unmanned aerial vehicle.

The army on Sunday managed to contain a clash in the Beirut neighborhood of Zoqaq al-Blat between supporters of Sheikh Ahmed al-Asir and others loyal to AMAL Movement and Hizbullah, shortly after the anti-Syria Salafist cleric launched a scathing attack on the two Shiite parties during an anti-Assad sit-in in downtown Beirut, state-run National News Agency reported.

“As Sheikh Asir's convoy passed through the Zoqaq al-Blat area, a number of young men who support a local party started pelting it with stones. An army patrol arrived immediately and contained the clash which did not cause any casualties,” NNA said.

Anti-Syria Salafist cleric Sheikh Ahmed al-Asir on Sunday urged the “rational brothers in the Shiite sect to save the country from the Iranian scheme and from the creeping woes that are being drawn by (Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan) Nasrallah's involvement in Syria.”

“I salute our heroic, free people in Syria,” Asir said during a sit-in he organized in downtown Beirut in support of the Syrian people.

Hundreds of Syrian and Lebanese supporters of the regime of President Bashar Assad staged a rally in Beirut on Sunday to thank Russia and China for supporting the Damascus regime, Agence France Presse reported.

Demonstrators held posters bearing slogans including "Thank you Russia!" and "Lebanon for ever with Assad's Syria," and also chanted slogans against Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which support the anti-regime revolt.

Two Lebanese nationals were killed in an armed attack in the Syrian town of Rableh on the border with Lebanon, state-run National News Agency reported on Sunday, after Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said Friday that around 30,000 Lebanese residents live in 23 Syrian border towns and 12 farms in the frontier region.

Lebanese citizens "Abdo Yaacoub al-Ahmar, who was born in the Hermel town of al-Shawaghir in 1920, and Taifallah Nicola Atiyyeh, 53, were transported from Syrian territory for treatement in Lebanon via the Lebanese border town of Hawsh al-Sayyed Ali after they sustained severe wounds in an armed attack on the town of Rableh. However, they succumbed to their wounds a short time later," NNA said.

The head of the Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc MP Fouad Saniora accused on Sunday Hizbullah of following Iran's bidding through its recent sending of an unmanned drone to fly over Israel.

He said during a seminar in the southern city of Sidon: “Hizbullah is dragging Lebanon towards military operations and a possible Israeli retaliation that the country has not been consulted over.”

Syrian fighter jets flew over parts of the Bekaa region in eastern Lebanon on Sunday, media reports said.

Voice of Lebanon radio (100.5) said that the jets flew over the outskirts of the town of Arsal.