Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has criticized the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon just days after a Spanish peacekeeper was killed by what Madrid said was Israeli fire.

In a telephone call with U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon late on Sunday, Netanyahu charged that the U.N. force was failing to report on what Israel alleges is large-scale movement of weapons into south Lebanon by Hizbullah.

The truckers syndicate at Beirut Port on Monday closed indefinitely the entrance to the facility pending a solution by the government to the controversial project to fill the port’s fourth basin.

The state-run National News Agency reported that the protesters held an open-ended strike, pending the referral of the file to the cabinet for discussion.

The European commissioner for humanitarian aid and crisis management has said that terrorism is a common enemy with Lebanon, adding that the presence of European troops in southern Lebanon would be discussed during a meeting in Brussels.

“We have a common enemy which is terrorism,” Christos Stylianides told An Nahar daily in an interview published on Monday.

Speaker Nabih Berri stressed that the criticism of Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's speech would not have repercussions on the fifth round of talks between Hizbullah and al-Mustaqbal despite contrary claims by Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq.

Local dailies quoted Berri as saying that “negative remarks against Nasrallah's speech won't impact the dialogue,” whose fifth round is set to take place in Ain el-Tineh on Tuesday.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has said that a third war with Lebanon has become inevitable, stressing that Hizbullah's latest attack on the Jewish State has changed the rules of the game.

"A fourth operation in the Gaza Strip is inevitable, just as a third Lebanon war is inevitable," Lieberman told Ynet, the website of the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonoth, on Sunday.

Security forces arrested on Sunday a Syrian officer suspected of having defected from the Syrian army, reported the National News Agency.

It said that the forces arrested Alaa Issam Mohammed at a checkpoint in the northern Akkar town of Shadra near the border with Syria.

A blast ripped through a bus carrying Lebanese Shiite pilgrims in Damascus on Sunday, killing at least nine people, a monitor said, in an attack claimed by al-Qaida's Syrian branch.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 20 people were wounded in the explosion near Souq al-Hamadiyeh district, and that six of the dead were Lebanese citizens.

Chairman of Iranian Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee Alaeddin Boroujerdi concluded on Saturday a visit to Lebanon during which he met with various Lebanese officials, including Speaker Nabih Berri, Prime Minister Tammam Salam, and Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

Salam had hoped during his talks with the Iranian official that Tehran would exert efforts that would help end the presidential deadlock in Lebanon, reported the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat on Sunday.

Director of the Department of the Middle East and North Africa at the French Foreign Ministry Jean-François Girault is expected to return to Beirut on Monday to continue his efforts to achieve a breakthrough in the ongoing deadlock over the presidential elections, reported the daily An Nahar on Sunday.

Observers ruled out the possibility that the French official would be able to create a breakthrough in his talks with local figures.

Fugitive Islamist Shadi al-Mawlawi is still hiding in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Hilweh in southern Lebanon, reported the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat on Sunday.

Judicial sources told the daily that his wife visited him on Friday with their four-year-old son Adam.