A poster showing Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Syrian President Bashar Assad recently held a secret meeting with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a tent on the Syria-Lebanon border, a Beirut-based newspaper has reported.

According to the unconfirmed report — published by the pro-Assad Ad-Diyar newspaper — no details of the content of the four-hour conversation between the Syrian dictator and the Lebanese Shiite terrorist chief were documented in writing.

The Saudi-owned pan-Arab Al-Arabiya TV channel reported, “If the rumors turned [out] to be true, observers say that Nasrallah might have imposed his full conditions on Assad in terms of security arrangements.”

In recent years, Hezbollah — which, like the Assad regime, is backed by Iran — has sent thousands of fighters to Syria to bolster the president’s forces in the ongoing civil war there. As reported by The Algemeiner, Hezbollah has sustained heavy losses in the conflict, with an estimated one-third of its active fighters being killed or wounded.

Earlier this month, Hezbollah held a military parade in Syria to show off its armored personnel carriers and anti-tank missiles, in what some interpreted as a show of strength meant for Israeli eyes. The IDF and Hezbollah last faced off directly a decade ago, in the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Since then, the Israel-Lebanon border has been largely quiet, with the exception of a few isolated incidents, including one in January 2015 in which two IDF soldiers were killed in a Hezbollah cross-border attack in the Mount Dov area.