In addition to his phone talks with President Michel Aoun on Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron has also called Speaker Nabih Berri and ex-PM Saad Hariri, MTV said on Friday.

“France has no intention to freeze its initiative, which is not confined to a deadline that expires on Sunday, as previously rumored,” MTV quoted unnamed sources as saying.

Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea said the French initiative was not launched to solve Lebanon’s multiple crises, but came to alleviate the suffering and burden of the Lebanese people.

A prominent Lebanese footballer has died of a bullet wound sustained last month during a funeral for one of the victims of the Beirut port blast, his club said Friday.

Mohamed Atwi, 32, played as a midfielder for a number of Lebanese clubs and won the national league three times with Beirut's Ansar, his club for almost a decade.

President Michel Aoun received a telephone call on Friday from his French counterpart where talks focused on the hurdles delaying the formation of the government missing a French deadline.

An Israeli court on Friday charged a Palestinian woman from east Jerusalem with membership in a terrorist organization after Israel's internal security service said the Lebanese group Hizbullah had recruited her five years ago.

Yasmine Jaber was arrested in early August. The Shin Bet internal security service said she was recruited by Hizbullah operatives at a conference in 2015 and asked to recruit others in east Jerusalem. It said she traveled to Istanbul on a number of occasions to meet Hizbullah operatives and communicated with them via social media.

A hearing session kicked off at Mount Lebanon's Justice Palace to question anti-Hizbullah Shiite scholar Ali al-Amin over accusations of "meeting Israeli officials” during a conference in Bahrain.

Hizbullah has stored chemicals that can be used to make explosives in several European countries, a senior State Department official said Thursday as he appealed to countries in Europe and elsewhere to impose bans on the organization.

Hizbullah operatives have moved ammonium nitrate from Belgium to France, Greece, Italy, Spain and Switzerland in recent years and are suspected to still be storing the material throughout Europe, said Nathan Sales, the State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo charged Thursday that Hizbullah “exploits Lebanon’s corrupt system just like other parties,” as the U.S. Treasury slapped sanctions on two Lebanon-based firms and a man described as a Hizbullah official.

“Lebanon’s political leaders have long exploited the lack of transparency in Lebanon’s economy to conceal their self-enrichment, while pretending they are defending the rights of their people. Despite its claims to the contrary, the terrorist group Hizbullah is every bit as involved in this deception as other actors,” Pompeo added in a statement.

The U.S. Treasury on Thursday imposed sanctions on two Lebanon-based companies and a man described as a Hizbullah official.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, sanctioned the companies Arch Consulting and Meamar Construction "for being owned, controlled, or directed by Hizbullah."

Prime Minister-designate Mustafa Adib on Thursday met President Michel Aoun in Baabda after which he announced that more time will be given to the efforts aimed at forming a new government.

“I discussed with the president the difficulties that we are facing in the formation of a new government,” said Adib after the talks.