"They drove us out at gunpoint," says Lebanese citizen Zeinab Qataya, who fled her adopted home in Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad and returned to her country to live in a camp built by Hezbollah.

The construction of the Imam Ali Housing Compound has proved controversial, but Lebanese and Syrian families pushed out of villages just over the border in Syria say they now rely on the Iran-backed movement for safety.

Iran on Friday said it expected to hold more negotiations with the United States after a day of indirect talks in Oman seen as a critical chance for diplomacy after President Donald Trump threatened new military action against Tehran.

With an American naval group led by an aircraft carrier in Middle Eastern waters, U.S. and Iranian delegations held talks in Muscat mediated by the Gulf sultanate without publicly meeting face-to-face.

Top U.S. military officer General Dan Caine met with Rodolphe Haykal this week, a spokesman said Thursday, after a previously planned visit by the Lebanese army commander to Washington was scrapped.

Caine held talks with Haykal on Tuesday and Qatar's defense chief the day before, "reaffirming the importance of the United States' enduring defense relationships in the Middle East," U.S. Joint Staff spokesman Joseph Holstead said in a statement, without providing further details.

Spanish rescuers on Thursday desperately searched for a woman missing after a new storm hit the Iberian peninsula while Portugal warned of a heightened flood risk after several months' worth of rain fell in a few hours.

One death has already been confirmed in Portugal from the seventh storm to hit the peninsula this year. Portugal has barely recovered from a battering by rain and winds last week that killed five people, injured hundreds and left tens of thousands without power.

Keir Starmer vowed Thursday to remain Britain's prime minister despite a storm over his appointment last year of disgraced politician Peter Mandelson, linked to late U.S. sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as Britain's envoy to Washington.

"I intend to go on doing that vital work for our country because I believe it is the absolute focus and of first importance for this government," he told reporters, after apologizing to the victims of Epstein for believing Mandelson's "lies" about their ties.

Ukraine and Russia have conducted their first prisoner exchange in months, each releasing 157 captured soldiers, Russia's defense ministry said Thursday, amid U.S.-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi aimed at ending the war.

"On February 5, 157 Russian servicemen were returned" from Ukraine, the defence ministry said in a statement. It added that "in exchange, 157 prisoners of war of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were handed over."

Iran's Revolutionary Guards have seized two oil tankers with their foreign crews in Gulf waters for "smuggling fuel," the Tasnim news agency reported Thursday.

It was not immediately clear what flags the tankers were carrying nor the nationalities of the crew.

Sustaining the fight against the Islamic State jihadist group is an "absolute priority" for France, its foreign minister said Thursday after meeting his Syrian counterpart in Damascus.

"For 10 years, France has fought relentlessly and mercilessly against the terrorists of Daesh in Iraq as well as in Syria," said Jean-Noel Barrot, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

Beirut accused Israel of spraying the herbicide glyphosate on the Lebanese side of their shared border, with President Joseph Aoun decrying a "crime against the environment".

After collecting samples following the recent spraying, the agriculture and environment ministries said some of them showed concentrations of glyphosate "20 to 30 times higher than the average" in the area.

China said on Thursday it would not join nuclear talks "at this stage" after the expiry of the U.S.-Russian START treaty triggered fears of a global arms race.

"China's nuclear capabilities are of a totally different scale as those of the United States and Russia (and) will not participate in nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage," Beijing's foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian told a news conference.