Hizbullah's al-Manar TV station reported Sunday that the group was exchanging the bodies of dead fighters with al-Nusra Front along the Lebanese-Syrian border in the first stage of a settlement that would restore order to the border region.

Hizbullah said it is handing over the bodies of nine Nusra fighters in exchange for the bodies of five of its own who were killed in two weeks of battles along the frontier.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat hailed on Saturday Hizbullah's fighters who were killed during a battle to “eliminate” al-Nusra Front group militants from the outskirts of Arsal.

“We are waiting for the Lebanese army to conclude the operation in Arsal's outskirts, meanwhile we greet the martyrs of Hizbullah who have fallen during the first stage of the mission,” said Jumblat in a tweet.

The tenure of Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff has ended after six months.

President Donald Trump announced via Twitter on Friday that he's replacing the former Republican Party chairman with the secretary of homeland security, John Kelly.

The Senate's decisive vote to approve a new package of stiff financial sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea sends the popular bill to President Donald Trump, who will be under pressure to sign it after weeks of intense negotiations.

Trump's likelihood of supporting the measure is a remarkable concession that the president has yet to sell his party on his hopes for forging a warmer relationship with Moscow. Trump's vow to extend a hand of cooperation to Russian President Vladimir Putin has been met with resistance as skeptical lawmakers look to limit the executive power's leeway to go easy on Moscow over its meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

The House has passed a $788 billion spending bill that combines a $1.6 billion down payment for President Donald Trump's controversial border wall with Mexico with a whopping budget increase for the Pentagon.

The 235-192 vote both eases a large backlog of unfinished spending bills and gives Trump and his House GOP allies political wins heading into the August recess. Challenging hurdles remain because the measure will meet with more powerful Democratic opposition in the Senate.

Dealing a serious blow to President Donald Trump's agenda, the Senate early Friday rejected a measure to repeal parts of former President Barack Obama's health care law after a night of high suspense in the U.S. Capitol.

Unable to pass even a so-called "skinny repeal," it was unclear if Senate Republicans could advance any health bill despite seven years of promises to repeal "Obamacare."

Lawmakers from Hamas and those affiliated with a former Gaza strongman have met for the first time in a decade in Gaza's parliament building.

Thursday's meeting was the latest sign that an emerging Gaza power-sharing deal between the territory's Hamas rulers and Mohammed Dahlan, a former leader in the rival Fatah party, is moving forward.

U.S.-backed Syrian fighters have captured almost half of Raqqa from the Islamic State group, but the push into the northern city has slowed due to large amounts of explosives planted by the extremists and their counteroffensives, a spokeswoman for the fighters and a monitoring group said Thursday.

The assault on Raqqa by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led fighting coalition, began June 6, backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and U.S. troops advising the local forces. Since then, the SDF has made steady advances from the eastern and western sides of the city reaching the walled old quarter.

The Trump administration is pushing for inspections of suspicious Iranian military sites in a bid to test the strength of the nuclear deal that President Donald Trump desperately wants to cancel, senior U.S. officials said.

The inspections are one element of what is designed to be a more aggressive approach to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. While the Trump administration seeks to police the existing deal more strictly, it is also working to fix what Trump's aides have called "serious flaws" in the landmark deal that — if not resolved quickly — will likely lead Trump to pull out.

Russia says the United States and its Western allies rushed to judgment and blamed the Syrian government for using sarin nerve gas in an attack on an opposition-held town in Syria without ever visiting the site and ignoring two witnesses presented by Damascus.

It also criticized the report by the fact-finding mission from the chemical weapons watchdog that investigated the incident in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 which killed more than 90 people, calling it "very biased."