Lebanon and Israel will sign a U.S.-brokered maritime border demarcation deal on Thursday, U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein said.

"We're going to have a deal," Hochstein told CNN, adding that it will "hopefully" be signed this Thursday.

The dollar exchange rate dropped from LBP 40,600 to 36,000 on the black market overnight, shortly after Central Bank Governor Riad Salamah said in a statement that the Central Bank would stop buying dollars on the Sayrafa platform as of Tuesday.

The unofficial exchange rate later surged to LBP 37,000.

The Israeli army said Monday it has thwarted a drug and weapon smuggling attempt from Lebanese territory into Israel overnight.

"A suspect was apprehended and two handguns and 30kg of drugs were confiscated," the Israeli army stated on twitter.

Author Salman Rushdie lost vision in one eye and was left "incapacitated" in a hand after he was stabbed in the United States in August, his agent said in an interview published this weekend.

The 75-year-old writer, who had received several death threats after the publication of his "The Satanic Verses", was stabbed several times in the neck and abdomen before he was due to give a talk in the state of New York.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Sunday said the political forces that seek presidential vacuum would be comitting "national treason."

The Presidency on Sunday dismissed as "totally baseless" media reports claiming that President Michel Aoun intends to sign "a decree accepting the government's resignation."

Israel's Supreme Court on Sunday paved the way for the signing of a maritime border deal with Lebanon, after it rejected appeals that the pact requires parliamentary approval.

President Michel Aoun called his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad two days ago and discussed with him the bilateral ties between the two countries and the issue of demarcating the maritime border between Lebanon and Syria, al-Akhbar newspaper reported on Saturday.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of "deliberately delaying" the export of grain from Ukrainian ports bound for countries in Africa and Asia.

"Today more than 150 ships are in a queue to fulfil contractual obligations for the supply of our agricultural products," Zelensky said in a video address.

Nasser Tabarani, a Palestinian refugee living in Lebanon, has tried twice to migrate by sea to a better life in Europe but was detained by troops both times and brought back to shore. He'd do it all over again, he said, since life has become unlivable for most Palestinians in crisis-hit Lebanon.

The 60-year-old father of seven said he borrowed a total of $7,000 to try and leave Lebanon and now has debts he can't pay back.