The Finance Ministry said Wednesday afternoon that active and retired servicemen can receive their monthly financial aid as of Thursday, after retired servicemen blocked the Ring, Saifi and Beshara al-Khoury roads in Beirut to protest their living conditions and a delay in the payment of their compensations.

Preparations are underway for Pope Leo XIV to travel to Turkey and Lebanon at the end of November in what would be his first trip abroad, Vatican sources told AFP.

The two-stage trip would likely last just under a week, AFP understands. The Vatican does not normally confirm official visits until closer to the time.

Prime Minister Nawaf Salam stressed Tuesday that his government did not create from scratch “the decision to extend the state’s authority across its territory, seeing as this decision had been in place since 1989, or since the Taif Agreement.”

“Today we are working on implementing it and it was underscored in President Joseph Aoun’s inaugural speech and in the Ministerial Statement,” Salam added, in a meeting with a delegation from the Press Syndicate.

Lebanese and foreign efforts are underway to address the file of the Lebanese captives who are being held by Israel, prominent parliamentary sources told Kuwait’s al-Anbaa newspaper.

The file had made progress in early 2025 with the release of some captives before the talks ground to a halt.

The Political Advisor to Hezbollah's Secretary General, Hussein Khalil, has accused the government of succumbing to "external dictates" when it took a decision to disarm Hezbollah, which he dubbed, in a radio interview, "a major sin".

Khalil said that the decision was faced with the strength and unity of the Shiite community.

President Joseph Aoun has met, on the sidelines of an Arab summit in Doha, with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the presidency said in a statement.

Aoun and al-Sharaa discussed bilateral relations, security along the Syrian-Lebanese border, the maritime border demarcation and the repatriation of Syrian refugees.

An Israeli airstrike targeted a building on the outskirts of the southern city of Nabatieh overnight, wounding 14 people, among them at least four children and seven women, the Health Ministry and the National News Agency said.

Two of the children are in critical condition, the Ministry added.

A shipowner wanted over the 2020 blast at Beirut port that killed more than 220 people has been arrested in Bulgaria, officials said Tuesday.

The August 4, 2020 disaster was one of the world's largest non-nuclear explosions, ravaging swathes of the Lebanese capital and injuring more than 6,500 people.

President Joseph Aoun on Monday announced that “the picture after the (Israeli) aggression against Doha has become clear and the response to it must be equally clear.”

The owner of the ship Rhosus that delivered the ammonium nitrate that exploded at Beirut’s port, Igor Grechushkin, has been arrested in Bulgaria based on a red Interpol notice issued by the Lebanese judiciary in 2020, Al-Jadeed TV reported on Monday.