Tens of thousands of Lebanese began casting their ballots Sunday in the first parliamentary elections in nine years, with people lining up early in the morning to take part in a vote that is being fiercely contested between rival groups backed by regional powers.

The voting is unlikely to change the existing balance of power among the major groups in Lebanon, but many hope new contenders from civil society groups can challenge the decades-old sectarian political system.

Few countries are as vulnerable to the Middle East's mayhem as Lebanon, which has taken in a million refugees from the catastrophic war in neighboring Syria, seen the Iran-backed Hizbullah party embroiled in that war and watched Saudi Arabia try to oust its prime minister.

Yet campaigning for Sunday's parliamentary election, the first in nine years, has timidly sidestepped the big issues, leaving many Lebanese expecting more of the same. It's especially galling for Lebanese concerned a still-dominant Hizbullah could drag the country into a looming Iranian-Israeli regional confrontation.

European Union election monitors are deploying around Lebanon, ahead of the country's first parliamentary elections in nearly a decade.

Over a hundred observers from European Union countries, as well as Norway and Sweden, will be working during the elections, according to the EU Election Observation Mission in Lebanon.

The Arab League said Thursday it supports Morocco's decision to sever ties with Iran over its alleged support for the Polisario Front in the disputed Western Sahara. Tehran has denied supporting the pro-independence group.

The spokesman for the Arab League's secretary-general, Mahmoud Afifi, said that the Arab League condemns and rejects Iran's s intervention in Morocco or any other Arab country's internal affairs.

With campaigning in full swing for Lebanon's first national election in nine years, parliament candidate Laury Haytayan was trying to rope in passers-by with her message: She and other political outsiders are running in a new coalition that aims to be an alternative to the country's traditional powers.

Some were clearly reluctant to engage, but that didn't stop the irrepressible Haytayan.

Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is urging high turnout in Lebanon's parliamentary elections due on May 6.

In a speech to supporters in the eastern city of Baalbek on Tuesday, Nasrallah says the group needs "political protection" against those conspiring against it, and that "this protection is afforded by your votes."

Has or had? The White House is quietly walking back a charge that Iran maintains an active nuclear weapons program, saying it really meant that Iran had one before the 2015 nuclear agreement.

A statement sent to reporters Monday by Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said a cache of Iranian documents released by Israel is "consistent with what the United States has long known: Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program."

Iran's state-run media on Monday mocked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's latest allegations that Tehran once pursued nuclear weapons.

In a presentation Monday that made use of large visual aids, Netanyahu said Israeli intelligence had uncovered a trove of documents from Iran's "nuclear archives."

Syrian President Bashar Assad has met with a visiting Iranian official who claimed "the project" of the United States and its allies in Syria has been defeated.

Alaeddin Boroujerdi, who heads Iran's parliamentary committee on national security and foreign policy, spoke hours after reports of a missile attack that killed dozens of Iranian fighters in northern Syria on Monday.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday that a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a priority for the Trump administration, despite its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and its planned move of the U.S. Embassy to the holy city over Palestinian protests.

Pompeo also said the U.S. is "fully supportive" of Israel's right to defend itself and declined to criticize the Israeli military for its use of live fire against Palestinian protesters along the Gaza border.