Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun defended on Tuesday the Lebanese army, warning of attempts to create division among its ranks.

He said after the Change and Reform bloc’s weekly meeting: “Some sides are seeking to create division in the army to break it up into militias.”

The Phalange Party on Monday warned of “the insistence of the Syrian regime and its tools to expand the circle of violating the Lebanese sovereignty,” urging the government to “be firm in protecting the citizens and sparing Lebanon the repercussions of the Syrian crisis.”

In a statement issued after its weekly meeting, the party’s political bureau slammed the recent deadly Syrian shelling on the northern border areas, urging the government to “be firm in protecting the citizens and sparing Lebanon the repercussions of the Syrian crisis, and to provide full political cover for the plan to deploy the army on the northern and eastern borders.”

French Ambassador to Lebanon Patrice Paoli hailed on Saturday the Lebanese democracy and coexistence, which became a model in the region.

“Lebanon’s democracy, freedom and coexistence among its citizens became a model in the region, in addition to the stability it witnessed during the recent months,” Paoli said in a ceremony held in Kasr al-Sanawbar on the occasion of French Bastille Day.

Syrian troops opened fire on protesters on Friday in Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo, the country's commercial hub, as at least 90 deaths were reported across the country.

Regime forces shot dead 14 people in Homs, 24 in Idlib, three in Daraa, four in Damascus, 12 in Aleppo, seven in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, two in Hama, two in the countryside around Damascus, one in Deir Ezzor and one in Latakia, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.

Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri condemned on Friday the “latest massacre committed by the Syrian regime” in the town of Treimsa in Hama, saying that it has hit “a new record in crimes against humanity.”

He said in a statement: “I call on all Arab and world governments, the Arab League, Organization of Islamic Conference, and the United Nations to take immediate, practical, and decisive measures to protest the Syrian people.”

Lebanese authorities have released a Syrian dissident who was arrested on the weekend upon his arrival from Egypt, Syrian activists said.

"Zakaria Mutlak was released this evening," Beirut-based Syrian activist Kinan Ali told Agence France Presse, without elaborating.

Forty percent of Lebanese hold a favorable opinion of Hizbullah, which receives its highest overall ratings in Tunisia from among six Muslim-majority countries, according to a poll published in the U.S.

But in Lebanon views about Hizbullah are sharply divided along sectarian lines: 94% of Shiites, 33% of Christians, and 5% of Sunnis give the group favorable marks, according to the survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in recent months.

Speaker Nabih Berri on Tuesday stressed that the Lebanese “cannot preserve national unity through consensual security, but rather through supporting the army.”

“We will not give up a single grain of our land's soil in the South and will not accept that our people remain a prey to (Israeli) tyranny,” Berri said in a speech he delivered at a ceremony to award him the Elias Hrawi prize for his role in preserving the National Pact.

The Change and Reform parliamentary bloc led by Free Patriotic Movement chief MP Michel Aoun on Tuesday stressed that “the judicial course must be respected in Sheikh (Ahmed) Abdul Wahed's case as well as the army's prestige.”

Change and Reform secretary MP Ibrahim Kanaan also told reporters after the bloc’s weekly meeting that “the timing of the state budget is important as we need to know what the government intends to spend, not only what it spent in the past.”

Hizbullah voiced on Monday its concern over Saudi Arabia’s actions against religious figures in the kingdom, the last of which was the “wrongful” arrest of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

It urged the Saudi authorities to “halt the undemocratic actions against the peaceful and legitimate demands of Saudi citizens,” calling on them to respect religious figures.