General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim said Friday that Lebanon is waging "a holy battle" to regain its maritime rights from the Israeli enemy.

He added that the battle includes controlling the land border crossings.

A senior Hezbollah official on Thursday confirmed that his party is pushing for the formation of a new government.

There is “a need to form a fully functional government that would work to alleviate people’s suffering,” Hezbollah central council member Sheikh Nabil Qaouq said.

President Michel Aoun on Thursday dismissed media reports claiming that he intends to stay in the presidential palace until the election of a new president even if his own term expires.

“The president stressed the need to form a new government as soon as possible,” Maronite League chief Khalil Karam said after meeting Aoun in Baabda.

Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil on Thursday lashed out at the “judges of negligence” over the Riad Salameh and Badri Daher cases, warning judges to “beware” because they “will be held accountable.”

“The judges have begged the central bank governor to hike their salaries, whereas he is supposed to be put on trial by them over several crimes that he has committed, the least of which is that he gave a commission to his brother’s firm for treasury bonds issued by the central bank for the benefit of the Lebanese state,” Bassil said in a video posted on social media.

The employees of Lebanon’s two state-owned mobile network operators, touch and Alfa, on Thursday began an open-ended strike to demand a wage hike, after their negotiations with the two firms’ administrations collapsed.

“All of Alfa and touch’s branches and selling points closed at the companies’ headquarters and in the various regions, as the sale of lines and recharge cards and customer services stopped and all maintenance works were suspended,” the National News Agency said.

In an audio recording circulating on social media, Beirut-based Saudi dissident Ali Hashem has threatened to attack the Saudi embassy in Beirut should Saudi authorities continue to “harass” his family back in the kingdom.

“If anyone touches any member of my family, no employee at the Saudi embassy will remain alive. I will carry out an unprecedented act and I will annihilate every person at the embassy and you know my capabilities very well,” Hashem says in the recording.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has held a meeting in Lebanon with Ziad al-Nakhalah, the secretary-general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement.

Nasrallah and Nakhalah “demonstrated the latest events in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and carried out an evaluation of the battle that occurred with the Israeli enemy at all the battlefield, political and media levels,” Hezbollah said in a statement.

Caretaker Energy Minister Walid Fayyad has said that his Ministry has not received “any official or unofficial offer from Turkey for drilling in the border (offshore) blocks.”

“Block 9 is tendered to the TotalEnergies company and when I was in Turkey no one raised the issue with me,” Fayyad told al-Mayadeen television.

Prime Minister-designate Najib Mikati held a new meeting Wednesday with President Michel Aoun at the Baabda Palace to discuss the formation of a new government.

"Discussions will be continued later," Mikati said in a terse statement while leaving the palace.

Lebanon, which is yet to reach a sea border demarcation deal with Israel, has received a Turkish proposal for investment and drilling in the southern oil and gas blocks near Israel’s border, a Lebanese official source said.

“The Turkish proposal involves drilling and investment works in Block 9, which lies on the maritime border,” the source told Russia’s Sputnik news agency.