Sources also told LBCI on Saturday that a delegation of the Association of Muslim Scholars is awaiting positive signs from Syrian Sheikhs who headed to Arsal's barren range in a bid to negotiate the release of Lebanese captives with Islamic State militants and the Emir of Jabhat al-Nusra in al-Qalamoun.
Clashes erupted in Arsal on Saturday (August 01) when Syrian gunmen deployed across the region after the Lebanese Armed Forces arrested Syrian national Imad Ahmad Jomaa at a checkpoint.
The army said 18 soldiers have been killed, with at least 30 other ISF and LAF soldiers missing and 86 injured in the fighting.
Lebanese security officials say the fighters include members of al Qaeda's Syria branch, the Nusra Front, and an al Qaeda splinter group, the Islamic State, which has seized swathes of land in Syria and Iraq.
Militant Islamists have mostly withdrawn from a Lebanese border town they seized at the weekend, taking with them captive Lebanese soldiers, militant and security sources said on Thursday, as a truce to end the deadly battle appeared to hold after 5 days of fighting.
Muslim clerics who had been mediating an end to five days of fighting in Arsal said they would negotiate for the release of remaining captives held by militants whose incursion into Lebanon marked the most serious spillover of Syria's three-year-old civil war into Lebanese territory.
The taking of Arsal was the first major incursion into Lebanon by hardline Sunni militants - leading players in Sunni-Shi'ite violence unfolding across the Levant - which threatens the stability of Lebanon by inflaming its own sectarian tensions.
Arsal is a Sunni Muslim town at the border where tens of thousands of refugees have taken shelter from the war in neighboring Syria. Their refugee camps have been badly damaged in the fighting, Syrian activists have reported. For more details, watch Edmond Sassine's full report in the video above