Security forces succeeded in thwarting an attempt to smuggle 3.5 tons of cannabis from Lebanon to Libya, the anti-drug bureau announced in a statement on Monday.

The drugs were transported from Lebanon to a ship, called Mare Ta Queen, which was docked outside of Lebanon's regional waters.

A number of youths were saved by Civil Defense teams after they were stranded in Nahr Ibrahim, reported the National News Agency on Monday.

It said that the group of 16 were stranded in the river after their rubber raft malfunctioned.

The southern Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Hilweh has long provided a stable, if destitute, bolthole for Palestinian refugees, some of whom have lived within its walls since fleeing their homes more than six decades ago.

But the war in neighboring Syria has transformed parts of the southern camp into a safe haven for jihadists traveling to fight there, creating districts where even Palestinian security forces fear to tread and raising tensions among residents.

An Internal Security Forces unit raided overnight the house of a Syrian national on suspicion of having links to the murder of a Lebanese man.

The state-run National News Agency reported that 20-year-old Syrian Nawwaf Abdul Aziz Mansour, who is suspected of having links to the murder of a 50-year-old Lebanese, was detained.

Baalbek resident Hussein Seifeddine was freed Sunday by his captors after he was abducted last week from a shop in the Bekaa border town of Arsal.

“He is now on his way to his home in the town of Hawsh al-Rafeqa in Baalbek,” state-run National News Agency reported in the evening.

Lebanese national Marwan Issa was found killed Sunday in the Ain el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in Sidon, a day after he went missing in the area.

“Issa was found killed with a gunshot to the head inside a car's trunk in the Jabal al-Halib area in the Ain el-Hilweh camp,” state-run National News Agency reported.

A confidential Spanish military report on the death of a Spanish U.N. peacekeeper in Israeli shelling in Lebanon said he was manning a post that appeared to have been targeted, a newspaper reported Sunday.

El Pais cited extracts from the report which drew on testimony from soldiers following the January 28 incident when the Israeli military shelled border areas following a Hizbullah attack that left two Israeli soldiers dead.

Several Lebanese truck drivers were able to cross to Lebanon on Sunday after being stranded for four days along the Syrian-Jordanian border.

According to Voice of Lebanon radio (93.3), six truck drivers, who were trapped at the Jordanian Nasib crossing, were able to cross the al-MAsnaa border crossing in the eastern Bekaa Valley.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi lashed out at politicians on Sunday, stressing that the Lebanese are suffering due to the vacuum at the Baabda Palace and the sharp rift between the political arch-foes.

“The acute dispute between the rival parties divided the country into two and obstructed the civil society,” al-Rahi said during his Easter sermon at Bkirki.

The Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Adel al-Jubeir, slammed Hizbullah for depicting the Yemen crisis as a sectarian conflict, accusing the party and its longtime ally the Islamic Republic of Iran of being behind the Shiite Huthi rebellion in Sanaa.

“In Lebanon, Hizbullah controls a state, and we do not want such a situation to develop in Yemen through Huthis,” al-Jubeir said during a symposium at the U.S. Congress on “Chaos in Yemen: Analysis, diagnosis and prospects”, which was organized by the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations in Washington.