One person was killed and five other people were wounded on Friday afternoon as clashes renewed in central Tripoli between armed Salafists and gunmen loyal to Damascus and Hizbullah.

A security source told Agence France Presse that one person was killed and five others wounded in the old souks area as a house went up in flames after being hit by a shell.

After new clashes between Syrian troops and rebels in the Golan, and Austria's announced withdrawal from a U.N. monitoring force, Israel is concerned about security along its ceasefire line with Syria.

The Israeli army remained on high alert in the region on Friday, bringing up reinforcements of tanks and troops, and readying an anti-tank missile unit, media said.

U.S. Republican senator John McCain warned on Thursday that the more than two-year-old war in Syria was reopening confessional wounds in Lebanon and said thousands of Hizbullah fighters were operating in the country.

“Old sectarian wounds are being reopened in Lebanon,” McCain said.

One person was killed and seven others were hurt as fierce clashes spread to the heart of the northern city of Tripoli on Thursday, after a security plan by the Lebanese army managed to relatively contain the violence in the flashpoint districts of Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen.

The army deployed in the souk area, restoring a tense calm four hours after the clash broke out between Salafists who support the revolt in Syria and pro-Damascus fighters, a security official told Agence France Presse.

Saudi Arabia's top cleric urged governments and fellow clerics across the Muslim world to punish Hizbullah for its intervention in the Syrian civil war against the mainly Sunni rebels fighting to oust President Bashar Assad.

Grand mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Shaikh said Hizbullah's actions vindicated the Sunni-dominated kingdom's long suspicion of the group and its alliance with Shiite Iran.

Around 10 rockets and mortar rounds from Syria slammed into the northeastern city of Baalbek on Wednesday night, injuring a Lebanese man and causing material damage, the army command said.

A military communique said Thursday that soldiers inspected the areas where the rockets had fallen and carried out patrols.

Syria's rebels conceded on Tuesday they had lost the battle for the strategic town of Qusayr but vowed to fight “thousands of Lebanese mercenaries” after the army seized total control of it and the surrounding region.

The main opposition National Coalition shrugged off the defeat, declaring the "revolution will continue".

The army vowed on Wednesday to trounce rebel fighters across Syria hours after recapturing Qusayr following a more than two-week assault on the strategic town on the border with Lebanon.

"After successive advances in the war against organised terrorists, our armed forces say they will not hesitate to crush the armed men wherever they are and in every corner of Syria," it said in a statement.

Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun on Tuesday said the Constitutional Council “cannot but accept” the challenges filed against the extension of parliament's term, calling for the replacement of security officials over the dire security situation in Tripoli.

“We extensively discussed the challenge we have filed and the possible effects should it be accepted. We agreed that as is the case with any vacant seat, elections would have to take place within 60 days and the parliament would be dissolved,” Aoun said after the weekly meeting of the Change and Reform parliamentary bloc in Rabiyeh.

Caretaker leader of the Syrian National Coalition George Sabra on Tuesday urged Speaker Nabih Berri to open “humanitarian corridors” to evacuate the wounded in the neighboring country's border town of a-Qusayr.

"There are more than 1000 wounded persons in al-Qusayr, 400 of them are in critical conditions, and we do not have enough support in the town to heal these people,” Sabra explained in a videotaped speech posted online.