Army troops were deployed overnight around a sewing factory where a major clash erupted between Lebanese and Syrian men.

The clash erupted on Thursday night near the Saint Maron Church in Dora after a road accident between a motorcyclist and a woman driving an SUV. The woman called the owner of a sewing factory, who's apparently a friend or a sibling. When the fight broke out, the factory's Syrian workers rushed to help their boss, witnesses said.

Lebanon faces one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, with nearly 4 million people in need of food and other assistance, but less than half getting aid because of a lack of funding, a U.N. official said Thursday.

Imran Riza, the U.N. humanitarian chief for Lebanon, adds that the amount of assistance the world body is giving out is "much less than the minimum survival level" that it normally distributes.

Army Commander General Joseph Aoun on Thursday snapped back anew at Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil over the latter’s criticism of the military’s handling of the Syrian refugee crisis.

“Today the army is facing various and increasing challenges on the various levels, whether inside the country or along the border. And despite the economic crisis and its repercussions, army personnel are carrying out their duties with all due enthusiasm and conviction and to the fullest, in all the missions assigned to them on land, at sea and in the air,” Aoun said.

The man who opened fire at the U.S. embassy in Awkar following a dispute with a guard had also shot at a compound containing foreign embassies in Beirut, the Internal Security Forces said on Thursday.

“Following further interrogation, he also confessed to shooting at the embassies compound in the Zokak al-Blat area on the night of August 25, 2023, justifying what he did by saying that he had a verbal clash with a convoy that was passing several days earlier on the Ring highway after which the convoy continued its journey and entered the aforementioned compound,” an ISF statement said.

French presidential envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian would only return to Lebanon if Lebanese parties agree to discuss a third option, political sources said.

The sources revealed to al-Liwaa newspaper, in remarks published Thursday, that Le Drian wants the political parties to waive their conditions and counter-conditions, in order to break the presidential impasse.

The role of sectarian divisions in fueling conflicts in Lebanon is one reason Talar Demirdjian distanced herself from religion.

"People either go very into their religion or their sects, or the other side." A Lebanese Armenian of Christian heritage, Demirdjian said about religion, "I don't even think about it enough to tick a label."

The Lebanese opposition has prepared a plan for resolving the Syrian refugee crisis that is based on two steps: distributing the refugees on Arab countries and halting the work of UNHCR (U.N. refugee agency) in Lebanon, media reports said.

UNHCR is “not only spending money to consolidate the presence of 850,000 refugees registered on its lists, but also on 900,000 unregistered (Syrian) migrants,” the Nidaa al-Watan newspaper reported on Thursday, quoting opposition sources.

The 28th edition of the European Film Festival in Lebanon has closed at Galaxy Grand Cinemas with the short film competition award ceremony, followed by the Avant-premiere of Lebanese feature film “Riverbed”.

Ambassador of the European Union to Lebanon, Sandra De Waele, awarded the Best Short Film Prize equally to three short films selected by an international jury, in the presence of Ambassador of Poland, Przemysław Niesiołowski, Director of Goethe- Institut Libanon, Anne Eberhard, and Cinema project manager at Institut français du Liban, Leïlah Gruas-Girling:

Lebanon's LGBTQ community has been reeling from months of snowballing hostility, as activists in one of the Middle East's more liberal countries worry about deteriorating personal and political freedoms.

Rights advocates and LGBTQ community members told AFP they have been harassed and even received death threats in recent months as controversy has raged over everything from rainbow imagery to family values and the "Barbie" movie.

A senior Arab League official has arrived in the French capital Paris to discuss the Lebanese file, diplomatic sources in Paris said.

The Arab official “might meet over the coming hours with French and Saudi officials involved in the Lebanese file in an attempt to remove the obstacles that are still preventing Lebanese consensus over a presidential candidate,” Asharq newspaper quoted the sources as saying.