Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun announced on Saturday that President Michel Suleiman “does not have the right to demand any government portfolio because he was elected as a neutral figure … which is a joke as there is no such thing in any country.

He added that the president does not even have a share in parliament.

Hundreds of Syrians, including four wounded people, have crossed into northern Lebanon fleeing violence in the Syrian town of Tall Kalakh, Lebanese security officials said Saturday.

The officials said the wounded who crossed the border into the Wadi Khaled area included a 26-year-old man who suffered a gunshot in his back and two women, also with bullet wounds. The fourth, a 30-year-old man, died of his wounds later at a north Lebanon hospital. The other three were being treated at two hospitals in the area, they said.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe called the Lebanese to speed up the formation of the cabinet in order to guarantee the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country.

“Keeping our contacts with our Lebanese allies” is our sole key to help in the cabinet formation, Juppe said in an interview with pan-Arab daily al-Hayat published on Saturday.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea said on Saturday that the main parties involved in the cabinet formation, especially Hizbullah and Syria, want a confrontational government.

“Hizbullah and Syria are heading towards a confrontational cabinet, while President Michel Suleiman and Premier-designate Najib Miqati want a cabinet that is closest possible to the Lebanese reality,” Geagea told Free Lebanon radio.

Thousands of Palestinians are expected to march to southern Lebanon on Sunday in what Fatah commander Munir Maqdah said would be a “peaceful” rally marking the Palestinian "Nakba Day."

The protestors will mark the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe, when Palestinians were expelled from their land in 1948 following Israel's establishment.

High-ranking March 8 sources refuted claims that the cabinet formation process has gone back to the starting point over crippling demands by the new parliamentary majority.

The sources told An Nahar newspaper in remarks published Saturday that the media and political sources began inventing rumors about an alleged stalemate despite agreement between President Michel Suleiman and Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun on the name of the interior minister.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi held talks with Iranian ambassador to Lebanon Ghazanfar Roknabadi in Bkirki on Saturday.

“The Iranian ambassador invited al-Rahi to attend the annual ceremony commemorating the death of Imam Khomeini, commander of the Iranian revolution, in UNESCO,” the National News Agency said.

Routine meetings that Premier-designate Najib Miqati has held with the envoys of the speaker, the Hizbullah leader and the Free Patriotic Movement chief are now in limbo after such talks were not held for the second straight day Friday.

An Nahar daily said Saturday that Miqati waited for answers from MP Ali Hassan Khalil, Hussein Khalil and Jebran Bassil on several questions he had raised to them earlier in the week. However, the three envoys did not visit him at his office on Friday.

Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblat criticized the new majority for its disability to form the cabinet, accusing it of being paralyzed.

Jumblat said on Friday during the opening ceremony of the National Center for Development and Rehabilitation that the politicians are the “retarded” ones for disagreeing over shares in the government while “the country is on the verge of collapse.”

The Syrian green light for the quick formation of the new government in Lebanon began receding, An Nahar daily said Saturday despite insistence by Premier-designate Najib Miqati that he wasn’t being pressured by foreign parties.

Sources following up the formation of the cabinet said that the green light received from Damascus succeeded in finding a solution to the interior ministry deadlock but later brought the cabinet formation crisis to a standstill after flashing orange.