Ministers met Tuesday at the Grand Serail in a ministerial, judicial and security meeting to discuss the Syrian refugee crisis.

The killing of Lebanese Forces Jbeil coordinator Pascal Sleiman earlier this month by a Syrian gang has triggered a backlash against Syrian refugees.

European Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Olivér Várhelyi has met in Beirut with Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri and Prime Minister Najib Mikati.

Várhelyi also met Monday with Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdallah Bou Habib, and the Commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces Joseph Aoun.

The five-nation group for Lebanon intends to pressure Speaker Nabih Berri in order to end the protracted presidential vacuum, a media report said.

“This will materialize in the meeting that will be held in Ain el-Tineh between Berri and the committee’s members,” the Nidaa al-Watan newspaper reported on Monday.

Jewish people mark on Monday the start of Passover, a celebration of freedom, and around many holiday tables in Israel chairs will stand empty for hostages still held captive in Gaza.

The week-long Jewish festival, also known in Hebrew as the "holiday of freedom", celebrates the Israelites' liberation from Egyptian slavery, as told in the Bible.

Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz has reassured residents of northern Israel that the "moment of truth" is approaching in terms of how to proceed militarily against Hezbollah.

"This is the operations front with the greatest and most urgent challenge, and this is how we must treat it," said Gantz.

Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil is continuing his “openness initiative” towards the Shiite Duo, a media report said.

It seems that Bassil’s steps “are much bigger than the political-electoral alliance at the elections of the Beirut Order of Engineers and Architects, the repeated meetings between Bassil and Speaker Nabih Berri, and the resumption of meetings with Hezbollah,” ad-Diyar newspaper reported on Monday.

France has presented a new proposal regarding the border conflict with Israel to caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, al-Akhbar newspaper said monday.

Mikati had met Friday in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron who told him that France would do "everything in its power" to stop violence spiralling between Lebanon and Israel.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea has stressed that “the state will not be built as long as the defiance camp led by Hezbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement is present.”

“The proof is their attempt to torpedo the municipal and mayoral elections after they realized that the popular mood is no longer in their favor,” Geagea added, in an interview with the L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper.

Israeli fighter jets struck a valley between the Jezzine district towns of al-Aishiyeh and al-Mahmoudiyeh, where an Israeli drone had been shot down overnight.

Hezbollah meanwhile targeted groups of soldiers in the Hanita and Dhaira posts in northern Israel and surveillance equipment facing al-Wazzani.

Terry Anderson, the globe-trotting Associated Press correspondent who became one of America's longest-held hostages after he was snatched from a street in war-torn Lebanon in 1985 and held for nearly seven years, has died at 76.

Anderson, who chronicled his abduction and torturous imprisonment by Islamic militants in his best-selling 1993 memoir "Den of Lions," died on Sunday at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.