With tears pouring down her cheeks, Syrian mother Shawafa Khodr mourns her daughter, missing since the crowded migrant boat she boarded hoping to join her fiancé in Germany sank in the Mediterranean.

Khodr refuses to believe her daughter is dead, hoping against the mounting evidence that the young woman did not drown in the waters off Lebanon, but has somehow survived.

The May 15 parliamentary polls will be a "political July War" and Hizbullah “will practice political resistance in the elections in order to preserve the military resistance,” Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Monday.

“Those who want to defend Lebanon, extract its oil resources and protect its waters must vote for the resistance and its allies,” Nasrallah told a Hizbullah electoral rally via video link.

The U.S. and Australian embassies in Lebanon have issued warnings to their citizens and tensions have surged in some areas amid reports that supporters of Hizbullah and the Amal Movement intend to stage a scooter rally in Beirut and its suburbs at 5pm Monday, media reports said.

The pro-Hizbullah al-Akhbar newspaper reported that the U.S. embassy asked its citizens in Lebanon to “avoid areas witnessing rallies and gatherings.”

Pope Francis may postpone a planned visit to Lebanon next month due to health reasons, a Lebanese minister said Monday.

Minister of Tourism Walid Nassar did not specify the ailment, but the pope is known to be suffering acute knee pain that has greatly curtailed his mobility in recent months. He has recently appeared in public using a wheelchair.

Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil on Monday said that voting for the FPM in the parliamentary elections is equivalent to voting for one’s “dignity.”

“The FPM has been and will always be your dignity. Vote for it,” Bassil said in a tweet.

Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri on Monday lauded Lebanese expats for “performing their national and constitutional duty” in the expat polls that were held on May 6 and 8.

“I thank everyone who took the trouble to travel and cross thousands of miles to reaffirm the honesty and genuineness of their belonging to Lebanon, the country whose borders are the entire universe,” Berri added.

Informed political sources have expressed concern that the Lebanese currency could witness a new freefall after the May 15 parliamentary elections.

“The central bank is still intervening to prevent a price deterioration and to keep (the dollar exchange rate) within LBP 25,000 to LBP 30,000, based on a request from some influential officials who want to keep the dollar under control, so that any surge does not affect the choices of voters” in the parliamentary elections, the sources told al-Joumhouria newspaper in remarks published Monday.

Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi launched Monday a new electronic platform for entering and sorting votes.

The new platform will be used for the first time in Lebanon in the May 15 parliamentary elections, next Sunday.

The World Bank approved a $150 million soft loan for food security in crisis-hit Lebanon to stabilize bread prices during the coming months, the economy minister said Monday.

Amin Salam told reporters that the loan has a very low interest rate but the minister did not make the rate public. He used the term soft loan indicating a below-market rate of interest.

The turnout of Lebanese diaspora voting in 58 countries ahead of May 15 parliamentary elections was nearly 60 percent, officials said Monday, similar figures to the last polls in 2018.

Some 130,000 Lebanese expatriates out of 225,000 registered voters cast their ballots, foreign ministry official Hadi Hashem said, releasing preliminary figures.