Gunmen withdrew Friday from the schools they were occupying in the Ain el-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp, as a joint Palestinian force started deploying in the camp’s al-Taamir area.

The National News Agency said a “positive atmosphere” was engulfing the deployment process and that the Palestinian force was supposed to enter into the camp’s schools.

The swift fall of the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani troops and exodus of much of its population has stunned the large Armenian diaspora around the world. Traumatized by genocide a century ago, they now fear the erasure of what they consider a central and beloved part of their historic homeland.

The separatist ethnic Armenian government in Nagorno-Karabakh on Thursday announced that it was dissolving and that the unrecognized republic will cease to exist by year's end – a seeming death knell for its 30-year de-facto independence.

The Internal Security Forces has confirmed that a food delivery driver who opened fire outside the U.S. Embassy in Beirut last week allegedly did so because of a personal grudge against the guards at the compound.

The ISF said they had arrested the suspected shooter on Monday, identifying him only by his initials M.K. and that he later confessed to the shooting.

The efforts of Qatari envoy Abou Fahad Jassem Al-Thani gained momentum after the Saudi meetings with French Special Presidential Envoy for Lebanon Jean-Yves Le Drian, a media report said.

“The Qatari envoy will have a second round of meetings with the political parties who have influence in the presidential file, but so far he has failed to find a common denominator between the Free Patriotic Movement and the Lebanese Forces and has failed to unite them over one of the three names that he has proposed,” al-Jadeed TV quoted unnamed sources as saying.

A bus carrying illegal Syrian migrants has been stopped by security forces in the coastal area of Hamat.

“A patrol from the Intelligence Branch (of the Internal Security Forces) managed at 1am to stop a bus driven by a Lebanese national and carrying 12 Syrians who had entered Lebanon illegally via an illegal border crossing in Wadi Khaled,” the state-run National News Agency said.

Rana Hariri doesn't know when she'll be able to send her children back to school, as Lebanon's grinding economic crisis thrusts the fate of public education into uncertainty.

Lack of funding for the school system has precipitated repeated teachers' strikes and school closures, resulting in children being increasingly pulled out of the formal learning system, and in some cases being forced to work.

United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon Joanna Wronecka on Thursday visited the Bekaa and Baalbek. She met with local Lebanese authorities, the UNHCR Lebanon Representative and visited a UNHCR community support project.

"The Immortals" have spoken: the 388-year-old Academie Francaise, custodian and promoter of the French language, has a new leader in the form of author Amin Maalouf.

The French-Lebanese writer, 74, becomes only the 33rd person to occupy the post of "perpetual secretary" since the body's founding under King Louis XIII in 1635.

Hundreds of Lebanese Armenians scuffled with riot police on Thursday outside the Azerbaijan Embassy in northern Beirut during a protest against the Azerbaijani military offensive that recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh from the enclave's separatist Armenian authorities.

Protesters waved flags of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, and burned posters of Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the demonstration in the Ein Aar suburb of the Lebanese capital.

Central Bank interim governor Wassim Mansouri on Thursday reassured that the bank will continue to pay the salaries of the public sector in U.S. dollars, which “provides stability to 400,000 families.”

“This is not a long-term stability but rather fragile stability, and if no president is elected the economic situations will further deteriorate,” Mansouri warned, following a meeting with the Economic and Social Council of Lebanon.