U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said Friday that Lebanese top officials were “in favor of being invited” to a peace conference on Syria in Geneva later this month.

Following separate talks with President Michel Suleiman, Speaker Nabih Berri and caretaker Prime Minister Najib Miqati, Brahimi said: “The three leaders are in favor of being invited to it.”

Israeli warplanes have struck a military base near the Syrian city of Latakia, targeting missiles that might have been destined for Hizbullah, CNN quoted an Obama administration official as saying on Thursday.

An explosion at a missile storage site in the area was widely reported in the Israeli press, but an attack has not been confirmed by the Israeli government.

Islamic Alawite Council head Sheikh Assad Assi on Thursday stressed that the council will not tolerate the summoning of top Alawite leader Ali Eid for interrogation in the case of the deadly twin bombings that rocked Tripoli in August.

“The Alawite sect totally disavows the perpetrators of the two massacres that happened outside the al-Taqwa and al-Salam mosques in Tripoli and it is awaiting a legal and national investigation, not a politicized investigation linked to a foreign scheme,” Assi said at a press conference.

A bomb exploded on Thursday morning near an army intelligence station in the central Bekaa region of Jalala.

The National News Agency reported that the bomb was discovered on the side of the ride, adding that it was placed behind the Moussawi institute in the area.

Syrian President Bashar Assad on Tuesday sacked his vice premier who had been absent without leave and held unauthorized meetings abroad, the official SANA news agency said.

The move follows media reports that Qadri Jamil, a vice premier for economic affairs, had met with the U.S. pointman for Syria, Ambassador Robert Ford, on Saturday in Geneva to discuss proposed peace talks.

Three soldiers were injured on Monday during a clash with gunmen in the northern city of Tripoli as they deployed in their neighborhood, part of a security plan in the capital of the North.

One of the soldiers was badly wounded after gunmen from the district of Bab al-Tabbaneh opened fire on them. The army responded to the sources of fire as the soldiers deployed heavily in the area.

Syria has freed 64 women prisoners this week, or half the number expected to be released under a weekend hostage deal, a human rights activist said Thursday.

Nine Lebanese pilgrim hostages held for 17 months by a rebel group in northern Syria were exchanged on Saturday for two Turkish pilots abducted in Lebanon in August.

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Miqati condemned on Thursday the renewal of clashes between the rival Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen neighborhoods in the northern city of Tripoli, saying that its residents feel like pawns in regional schemes.

He said after holding a security meeting with President Michel Suleiman on the latest developments in the city: “There is no other option for Tripoli but resorting to the state.”

Creepy crawlies, in the form of a venomous spider infestation, has forced a school in Britain to close a week before Halloween.

The Dean Academy, a secondary school in southwest England's Gloucestershire, said it was closing Wednesday to get rid of the false widow spiders. The spiders are commonly mistaken for their relative, the black widow spider, whose bite can be fatal.

An attack by rebels near Damascus has caused a power outage across Syria, state news agency SANA quoted the electricity minister as saying.

"A terrorist attack on a gas pipeline that feeds a power station in the south has led to a power outage in the provinces, and work to repair it is in progress," Emad Khamis said.