A contractor said Tuesday that he negotiated with an Australian television network to snatch two Lebanese-Australian children from their father's family in Beirut but the network chose a cheaper option.

Col Chapman, who describes himself as a child recovery specialist, said executives at the Nine Network's "60 Minutes" program told him to "sharpen his pencil" when he quoted them 150,000 Australian dollars ($114,000) late last year to get the children Lahala, 6, and Noah, 4, out of Lebanon.

Public Works Minister Ghazi Zoaiter expected the cabinet to approve on Tuesday the necessary funding to improve security at Rafik Hariri International Airport despite the insistence of Christian ministers to resolve the controversy on the State Security agency first.

Zoaiter told al-Mustaqbal daily that he agrees with Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq on the importance of resolving the security of the airport amid claims of misunderstanding between them.

Telecommunications Minister Boutros Harb has said that the judiciary is “no longer hesitant” in dealing with the scandal on the illegal internet network.

Harb told An Nahar daily published on Tuesday that the issue “is taking a serious turn after it was being dealt with laxly.”

Lebanon has tried in vain to stop considering Hizbullah a terrorist group at a preparatory meeting for the Islamic summit that will be held in Turkey later this week, As Safir daily reported on Tuesday.

The meeting was held in Istanbul ahead of the talks of the foreign ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation on Tuesday.

The judiciary has ordered the closure of 13 brothels involved in human and sex trafficking, media reports said on Monday.

A state prosecutor in Lebanon is expected to file kidnapping charges against an Australian woman, an Australian TV crew, and others for attempting to take the woman's two children away from her Lebanese ex-husband and bring them back to Australia.

Sally Faulkner, along with four Australians, two Britons, and two Lebanese, was brought into police custody last Thursday after a botched attempt was made to snatch Faulkner's five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son from their paternal grandmother as she took them to school in the Hadath area.

The army announced Monday that two Beirut airport workers held on suspicion of terrorism have been freed after being cleared of the charges.

“They were interrogated under the supervision of the relevant judicial authorities and eventually released after it was verified that they had no ties to any terrorist activities or groups,” the Army Command said in a statement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted Monday for the first time that Israel has carried out strikes inside Syria to prevent Hizbullah from acquiring what he described as “game-changing” weapons.

“We are proud that in the stormy and volatile Middle East, we were able to maintain relative calm and relative safety in Israel. We act when we should act, including here, across the border, in dozens of attacks, to prevent Hizbullah from getting game-changing weaponry,” said Netanyahu during a visit to Syria's occupied Golan Heights where he observed a military drill.

The Gulf kingdom of Bahrain on Monday published a list of 68 Islamist groups it classified as "terrorist", the state news agency BNA said.

Hizbullah, already branded as "terrorist" by the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League, topped the list approved by Bahrain's cabinet, BNA said.

Al-Mustaqbal movement leader ex-PM Saad Hariri declared Monday that he would want Hizbullah's controversial arsenal of weapons to be part of any “package deal” among the rival political parties.

“When Hizbullah lost hope that (Free Patriotic Movement founder MP Michel) Aoun can become president, it started talking about the package deal,” said Hariri in a chat with reporters.