Syria's embassy in Lebanon suspended consular services Saturday, a day after two relatives of deposed Syrian President Bashar Assad were arrested at the Beirut airport with allegedly forged passports.
Also on Saturday, Lebanese authorities handed over dozens of Syrians — including former officers in the Syrian army under Assad — to the new Syrian authorities after they were caught illegally entering Lebanon, a war monitor and Lebanese officials said.

The top diplomats of China and Iran agreed Saturday that the Middle East is "not a battleground for the big powers" and should not be an arena of geopolitical competition between countries outside the region.

The Israeli military said it intercepted a missile launched from Yemen early Saturday, a day after the Houthi-held capital Sanaa was hit by fresh air strikes.

Israeli troops stormed and set fire to one of the last hospitals operating in the northernmost part of Gaza on Friday, forcing many of the staff and patients out of the facility, the territory’s health ministry said.

Iran's top diplomat warned Friday against "destructive interference" in Syria's future and said decisions should lie solely with the country's people, writing in Chinese state media as he visited Beijing.

The Arab League regional bloc has called on Iran not to fuel "strife" in Syria, after the ouster of Tehran ally president Bashar al-Assad ended decades of rule by his clan.
Assad's government crumbled on December 8 and he fled for Russia, another key backer of his rule, after an Islamist-led coalition of fighters wrested control of city after city until they reached Damascus.

The Israeli military said it conducted air strikes on Friday targeting "infrastructure" on the Syrian-Lebanese border near the village of Janta, which it said was used to smuggle weapons to the armed group Hezbollah.
"Earlier today, the IAF (Israeli air force) struck infrastructure that was used to smuggle weapons via Syria to the Hezbollah terrorist organization in Lebanon at the Janta crossing on the Syrian-Lebanese border," the military said in a statement.

A Syria war monitor has said the country’s new authorities have arrested a military justice official under the ousted government of president Bashar al-Assad who issued death sentences in the notorious Saydnaya prison.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Mohammed Kanjo Hassan was arrested in the coastal Tartus province, a stronghold of Assad’s clan, along with 20 members of his entourage.

Yemeni rebels claimed a strike against the airport in Israel's commercial hub of Tel Aviv on Friday, after Israeli air strikes hit rebel-held Sanaa's international airport and other targets in Yemen.

The head of the U.N. health agency says he and his team were about to board a flight in Yemen’s rebel-held capital Sanaa when the airport came under aerial bombardment.
“The air traffic control tower, the departure lounge — just a few meters (yards) from where we were — and the runway were damaged,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on X.
