Hizbullah Deputy Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem noted on Friday that there was nothing worth responding to at the March 14 rally last Sunday, saying that the party “has not and will not do so.”

He said: “We are not concerned with what they said and what happened at the event.”

President Michel Suleiman congratulated on Friday the Lebanese army for uncovering the Israeli spy system in the southern town of Shamaa on Thursday.

He said: “The discovery once again exposes Israel’s ongoing violation of U.N. Security Council resolution 1701 and Lebanon’s sovereignty before the international community.”

UNIFIL Commander Maj. Gen. Alberto Asarta has confirmed that the peacekeepers protested to Israel’s Northern Command the pelting with stones on international troops from the other side of the border.

The stones thrown at peacekeepers from the Israeli side across the technical fence and the Blue Line on Wednesday and Thursday were “isolated incidents that could happen at any time,” Asarta told As Safir daily in remarks published Friday.

Israeli President Shimon Peres revealed on Thursday that former Syrian President Hafez Assad agreed to personally meet him in 1996 to negotiate a peace deal between the two countries, adding that both Syria and Lebanon must choose between Iranian ambitions and a peaceful Middle East, reported Haaretz on Thursday.

Peres said that in 1996, "following the assassination of [former Prime Minister] Yitzhak Rabin, the Americans communicated a message from Assad senior, in which he expressed his desire to renew peace efforts."

The army command announced on Thursday that it has dismantled an Israeli spy and surveillance system in the southern town of Shamaa near Tyre.

It said in a statement that the system was placed in a camouflaged rock and that it consisted of a surveillance device, another for sending photographs, a power source, and a cooling system.

The relics of Saint Therese of Lisieux, a widely-revered 19th-century Roman Catholic nun, made a solemn entry into Jerusalem on Wednesday, the start of a tour of the Holy Land until May 31.

While the relics, fragments of the French saint's femur and foot bones, have been on a world tour for many years their arrival in Tel Aviv on Monday marked their first time in the land she longed to visit in life.

Change and Reform bloc MP Farid al-Khazen had suggested severing ties between the Free Patriotic Movement and Hizbullah, revealed a leaked U.S. Embassy cable published exclusively in Al-Akhbar Thursday.

The MP also stressed the need to diminish Hizbullah’s military powers, said the Wikileaks cable dated July 2006.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat and MP Marwan Hamadeh both supported an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon during the July 2006 war, said a leaked U.S. Embassy cable published exclusively in Al-Akhbar on Thursday.

The Wikileaks cable spoke of a late night meeting between U.N. special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, Jumblat, and Hamadeh during which the former suggested handing over the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah to the Lebanese state.

Al-Akhbar daily on Thursday unveiled what it said was a WikiLeaks cable exposing MP Marwan Hamadeh telling former U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman that the Lebanese army would be embarrassed if Hizbullah handed over its weapons to it.

Al-Akhbar published the Arabic translation of the document filed by Feltman dated July 29, 2006, during the Israel-Hizbullah war.

A leaked U.S. Embassy cable published exclusively in Al-Akhbar on Thursday revealed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s disappointment with the Jewish state’s failure in the July 2006 war, saying that it had mishandled the situation in Lebanon.

The Wikileaks cable also quoted him as saying before the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Richard Jones that the failure empowered Israel’s enemies in Lebanon.