Secret talks and quiet ties — that's what paved the way for last week's deal between the United Arab Emirates and Israel to normalize relations.

Touted by President Donald Trump as a major Mideast breakthrough, the agreement was in fact the culmination of more than a decade of quiet links rooted in frenzied opposition to Iran that predated Trump and even Barack Obama, as well as Trump's avowed goal to undo his predecessor's Mideast legacy.

Some supporters of ex-PM Saad Hariri in the Beirut district of Tariq al-Jedideh on Tuesday expressed anger and disappointment at the verdicts issued by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon over Rafik Hariri’s assassination.

"If a police station in Tariq al-Jedideh had investigated this crime, it would have been a better result," one man, driving away on a scooter, told a local television station.

The U.N.-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon on Tuesday convicted one member of Hizbullah and acquitted three others of involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The STL said Salim Ayyash was guilty as a co-conspirator of five charges linked to his involvement in the suicide truck bombing. Hariri and 21 others were killed and 226 were wounded in a huge blast outside a seaside hotel in Beirut on Feb. 14, 2005.

Judges at a U.N.-backed tribunal said Tuesday that there was no evidence the leaderships of Hizbullah and Syria were involved in the 2005 suicide truck bomb assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Lebanon is facing a surge in coronavirus cases after a devastating blast at the Beirut port earlier this month killed scores and wounded thousands, prompting medical officials to urge Monday for a two-week lockdown to try to contain the pandemic.

Virus numbers were expected to rise following the Aug. 4, explosion of nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate stored at the port. Around 180 people were killed, more than 6,000 wounded and a quarter of a million left with homes unfit to live in. The blast overwhelmed the city's hospitals and also badly damaged two that had a key role in handling virus cases.

More than 15 years after the truck bomb assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut, a U.N.-backed tribunal in the Netherlands is announcing verdicts this week in the trial of four members of Hizbullah allegedly involved in the killing, which deeply divided the tiny country.

The verdicts on Tuesday at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, based in a village on the outskirts of the Dutch city of The Hague, are expected to further add to soaring tensions in Lebanon, two weeks after a catastrophic explosion at Beirut's port that killed nearly 180 people, injured more than 6,000 and destroyed thousands of homes in the Lebanese capital.

President Michel Aoun has said that “some time is needed” for results to start emerging from Lebanon’s probe into the devastating August 4 explosion in Beirut.

“We had the will to reach a quick result in the probe into the blast that occurred at Beirut port on August 4, but we eventually realized that things are intertwined and require some time,” said Aoun an in interview with French news channel BFMTV.

Lebanon's judicial investigation of the Beirut port explosion started with political wrangling over the naming of a lead investigator, military threats to jail leakers and doubts over whether a panel appointed along sectarian lines could be fully impartial.

So for many Lebanese, their greatest hope for credible answers about the blast that wrecked much of their capital may lie with outsiders. Families of the dead and survivors on Friday asked the U.N. Security Council for an international investigation. Others pin their hopes on the French forensic police who have joined the probe and FBI investigators are expected to take part.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Friday that Western countries should not take advantage of the massive explosion in Beirut last week that killed and injured thousands of people to dictate their own policies on the tiny Arab country.

Zarif's comments came in Beirut as a senior U.S. official and France's defense minister were in the country. The Aug. 4 blast at Beirut's port killed nearly 180 people, injured 6,000 and caused widespread damage in the capital.

The death toll from last week's massive explosion in Lebanon's capital has risen to nearly 180, with an estimated 6,000 people injured and at least 30 missing, the United Nations said Friday.

The explosion has affected operations at six hospitals, up from an initial three, and damaged more than 20 clinics in the parts of Beirut worst hit by the blast, the U.N.'s humanitarian affairs agency said in its report.