Shell from Syria wounds citizen in Akkar town

A Shilka-type shell fired from Syria landed in the Akkar town of al-Dawseh, wounding a Lebanese man, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported on Thursday, without elaborating on who might have fired it.

The defense ministers of Lebanon and Syria signed an agreement in Jeddah in late March "to address security and military threats" along the countries’ common border. The accord came after frontier clashes earlier in March left 10 people dead. Those clashes pitted Syrian authorities against Hezbollah-allied Lebanese clans.

Border tensions flared earlier in March after Syria's new authorities accused Hezbollah of abducting three soldiers into Lebanon and killing them. The Iran-backed group, which had been an ally of toppled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, denied involvement.

Prime Minister Nawaf Salam met in Damascus in mid-April with Syria's interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa, accompanied by a Lebanese ministerial delegation comprising the ministers of foreign affairs, defense and interior.

It is the first trip to Damascus by a senior Lebanese official since a new government was formed in Beirut in February, two months after an Islamist-led alliance ousted longtime Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad.

This visit is "key to correcting the course of ties between the two countries on the basis of mutual respect," a Lebanese official said.

Beirut and Damascus have been seeking to improve ties since the overthrow of Assad, whose family dynasty commanded a decades-long tutelage over Lebanon and is accused of assassinating numerous Lebanese officials who expressed opposition to its rule.

Salam’s talks in Damascus tackled controlling and demarcating the porous, 330-kilometer shared border, as well as combating smuggling.

In December, Sharaa said his country would not negatively interfere in Lebanon and would respect its neighbor's sovereignty.