The government will convene on Thursday at the Baabda Palace under the chairmanship of President Michel Aoun to discuss needed mechanisms after the Constitutional Council's decision to annul a tax law intended to fund the wage scale, in addition to a number of fiery issues that took their toll lately on the general situation in the country.

Sources close to President Aoun told al-Akhbar daily: “The aim of today's meeting is to come up with a solution. Contacts are continuing between ministers of the Free Patriotic Movement and ministers of the Amal movement to reach a formula,” as for the repercussions of the annulled tax law that triggered uproar in the country.

Prime Minister Saad Hariri welcomed the Palestinian reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, and hoped it would be a “step towards achieving full Palestinian unity and establishing a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,” Hariri's media office said Wednesday.

Lebanon's and Egypt's national carriers will halt flights to the Iraqi Kurdish regional capital Arbil this week at the request of the Baghdad authorities, they said on Wednesday.

Their decision comes after Iraq's government threatened to ban international flights to and from Iraqi Kurdistan after the region held an independence referendum on Monday.

The Lebanese Army confiscated explosive devices and suicide explosive belts in the Khirbet Yunine town in the outskirts of Arsal, the Army Command-Orientation Directorate said Wednesday.

“A patrol from the army intelligence directorate confiscated six explosive devices that were prepared for detonation each weighing 500 kg,” said the statement.

Foreign Minister Jebran Bassil is expected to comment on the uproar in Beirut over his meeting with his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Muallem in New York, a meeting which Education Minister Marwan Hamadeh said “falls in the context of stepping away from Lebanon's dissociation policy,” and does not serve the issue of refugees' return, al-Joumhouria daily reported Wednesday.

“Bassil-Muallem meeting has nothing to do with the return of refugees because there will be no return until safe areas are secured under a political solution. The Syrian regime has abandoned them because it wants to change Syria's demographics,” Hamadeh told the daily..

The crisis of Syrian refugees in Lebanon has taken a heavy toll on the country's society, and figures from the March 8 camp believe that the controversial issue of initiating talks with the Syrian government are “necessary to solve the crisis,” al-Joumhouria daily reported on Wednesday.

“Do we want to address the problem of displaced Syrians or not? If we want to deal with that, dialogue with the Syrian government is necessary and every other word is a kind of anesthetizing the people,” a ministerial source from the March 8 alliance told the daily.

President Michel Aoun has said from Paris he wants some 1.5 million Syrian refugees living in Lebanon to henceforth start returning to their homes, voluntarily or not.

Aoun, in a state visit to France, said that U.N. assistance given to aid Syrian refugees in "camps of misery" in Lebanon would be better used to return them to their country "from now on."

After Lebanon's highest constitutional authority decided to annul a tax hike law which people fear could affect the wage scale law, Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil said on Saturday the amount of money to cover the public sector salaries for September is “ensured,” al-Joumhouria daily reported Saturday.

Media office of President Michel Aoun said on Friday that remarks published in the American al-Monitor website, quoting the President during his stay in New York, included “inaccurate positions and some came out of context,” the National News Agency reported.

“The Lebanese Presidency media office confirms that the positions made by the President are no different from what he said in the speech he delivered before the UN General Assembly and during his meetings with Arab and foreign officials and the Secretary-General of the United Nations,” said the statement.

Israeli strikes hit a weapons depot by Damascus airport overnight, targeting a warehouse reportedly belonging to Hizbullah, which is allied with the Syrian government, a monitor said Friday.

"Israeli warplanes targeted with rocket fire a weapons depot belonging to Hizbullah near the airport," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.