A Lebanese citizen kidnapped on Thursday by masked gunmen on the Ablah road in the Bekaa was released in unknown circumstances, media reports said.

Antoine Daher al-Kaadi was reportedly in the custody of the army intelligence that will hand him over to his family after he gives his testimony.

Hizbullah had recently established a small military airport in the Bekaa city of Baalbek and is operating Iranian-made drones, the Saudi al-Watan daily reported on Thursday.

According to the daily, Hizbullah also created high-security secret tunnels and depots, that were dug under Iranian supervision.

Senior officials discussed a controversial decision enforced by Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq to shut down two centers of filling gas canisters in Beirut's southern suburbs.

According to al-Liwaa newspaper published on Thursday, ex-Prime Minister Saad Hariri contacted high-ranking officials to address the matter and resolve the repercussions caused by the shutting down of the two companies.

The United States is restricting the movement of Syria's U.N. ambassador, limiting him to a 25-mile radius around New York City, the State Department said Wednesday.

Officials gave no explanation for the move against Bashar Jaafari but US relations have deteriorated sharply with Damascus since Syrian President Bashar Assad led a crackdown against a pro-democracy uprising in 2011.

Behind barbed wire fences at a top-security site in a German forest, workers in hazard suits will soon destroy remnants of Syrian chemical weapons of a type first tested here during World War I.

Far from the battlefields of the three-year-old Syrian war, this remote high-tech facility, which usually destroys munitions from two world wars, will help eliminate mustard gas stocks from the arsenal of President Bashar Assad.

Israel intercepted a ship in the Red Sea carrying Iranian "advanced weaponry" bound for Palestinian militants in Gaza on Wednesday, the military said.

But an Iranian official denied the Israeli report.

The Qaida-inspired al-Nusra Front in Lebanon on Wednesday claimed responsibility for firing three rockets on the Bekaa town of al-Nabi Sheet, in the latest such attack this week.

“The heroes of al-Nusra Front in Lebanon shelled the lairs of the party of Iran (Hizbullah) with three Grad rockets in retaliation to its massacres in Syria,” the group said on its Twitter page.

Syria's best-known filmmaker was released after being taken in for questioning by intelligence forces at the Lebanese border as he made his way to a festival in Geneva, a friend said Wednesday.

"Mohammad Malas was held for five hours by the intelligence forces on Tuesday. He was released, but is still in Syria," the friend, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Agence France Presse.

President Michel Suleiman hoped on Wednesday that the international community will commit to pledges it had made towards Lebanon concerning tackling the Syrian refugees and assisting the Lebanese army.

He said: “We hope the international community will support the army to help it implement a defense strategy that I had proposed at the national dialogue.”

Syrian government forces are waging a campaign of siege warfare and starvation against civilians as part of their military strategy, a U.N.-mandated probe said Wednesday.

Armed opposition groups are also besieging and indiscriminately shelling civilian neighborhoods, the independent Commission of Inquiry on the human rights situation in Syria said in a report.