Lead judicial investigator into the Beirut port blast Judge Fadi Sawwan on Monday heard the testimonies of four witnesses and will question more witnesses on Tuesday, the National News Agency said.

Sawwan also dismissed motions for the release of three detainees in the case, remanding them in custody.

Director of Media Focal Center, Salem Zahran, filed a complaint on Monday with the Public Prosecution Office to investigate the “waste of public funds" in the Ministry of Economy and Trade specifically in subsidized food commodities.

Israeli troops carried out maintenance work using a bobcat bulldozer in the occupied territories off Lebanon’s Marjayoun plains, the National News Agency reported on Monday.

Italian PM Giuseppe Conte is expected to kick off a two-day visit to Beirut on Tuesday for talks with senior Lebanese officials, and to inspect the UNIFIL’s Italian battalion and the blast site in Beirut’s port, media reports said on Monday.

Cypriot authorities are alarmed over the arrival of four boats carrying Syrian and Lebanese migrants in waters off the east Mediterranean island nation's coastline within a 48-hour span.

Cyprus police said Sunday that four vessels appeared off Cyprus' eastern and southern coast over the last two days carrying a total 123 migrants and about half of them have been permitted to disembark.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea on Sunday lashed out at the 2006 memorandum of understanding between Hizbullah and the Free Patriotic Movement, which was signed at the Mar Mikhail Church in Shiyyah.

“There is a magical word which summarizes the reasons behind everything we have reached, which is the Mar Mikhail understanding,” said Geagea in a speech in Maarab that followed an annual mass commemorating the LF fighters who fell during civil war.

A search operation of a building that collapsed during last month's deadly blast in Beirut stopped on Sunday after rescue workers said they did not find any survivors.

"There's nothing more," after an exhaustive search that lasted three days, George Abou Moussa, Lebanon's civil defense operations chief, told AFP. "There was nobody alive and there were no dead."

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Sunday called on Prime Minister-designate Mustafa Adib to form a “small emergency government.”

Addressing Adib by his title, al-Rahi added that the new government should be “competent and strong” and should inspire “seriousness, ability and hope.”

President Michel Aoun is still insisting on the formation of a 24-minister “techno-political government,” media reports said.

“Efforts are underway to convince the PM-designate of this approach,” informed sources told the al-Anbaa newspaper of the Progressive Socialist Party.

Leaders of Lebanon's Hizbullah and the Palestinian Hamas movement, both enemies of Israel, have met in Lebanon to discuss diplomatic normalization between Israel and Arab countries, Hizbullah said Sunday.

They stressed the "the firmness of the axis of resistance in the face of all pressures and threats," a Hizbullah statement said, without revealing where or when the meeting took place.