The dramatic collapse of Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime has thrown light into the dark corners of his rule, including the industrial-scale export of the banned drug captagon.

Victorious Islamist-led fighters have seized military bases and distribution hubs for the amphetamine-type stimulant, which has flooded the black market across the Middle East.

Led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, the rebels say they found a vast haul of drugs and vowed to destroy them.

Hundreds of Syrians on Thursday buried activist Mazen al-Hamada, whose body was found alongside 35 others in a hospital morgue near Damascus following the ousting of longtime leader Bashar al-Assad.

Hamada had been jailed twice under Assad, the first time in 2011 when the Arab Spring protests erupted in the country, before he managed to escape and flee to the Netherlands in 2014, where he sought asylum.

Lebanon said an Israeli strike on the border town of Khiam killed one person Thursday, hours after Washington announced Israel withdrew from the area as Lebanon's army deployed under a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah.

Israel stepped up its campaign in south Lebanon in late September after nearly a year of cross-border exchanges begun by Hezbollah in support of Hamas following its Palestinian ally's October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel.

A ceasefire came into effect on November 27. Both sides have accused the other of repeated violations.

Maher Semsmieh turned in his rifle on Thursday at an office of Syria's Baath party, more than 60 years after its oppressive rule in Syria began, and days after it ended.

"We are no longer Baathists," Semsmieh, 43, said with a smile of relief, four days after Islamist-led rebels toppled the Baathist government of president Bashar al-Assad.

"We were obliged to belong to Baath because, for them, if you weren't with them you were against them," Semsmieh said.

Syria's new leadership said Thursday it was searching for abducted US journalist Austin Tice and had secured the release of another American it said had been held by the ousted government.

In 2022, US President Joe Biden accused Syria of holding Tice, a freelance photojournalist detained near Damascus a decade earlier, and demanded that the government of Bashar al-Assad release him.

The transitional government, which took the helm in Syria after Assad's ouster on Sunday, said that "the search for American citizen Austin Tice is ongoing".

Paraguay's President Santiago Pena vowed on Thursday to stand with Israel, as he inaugurated the Latin American country's embassy after it moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for a second time.

"We were with you, we are with you, and we will always stand with the people of Israel", Pena said during a ceremony to inaugurate the mission that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended.

With the overthrow of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, many in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights say they want peace with Israel and a return to Syrian control.

Kamil Khater, a barber in the Druze Arab town of Majdal Shams, said: "We, the Syrians... want peace with everyone, including Israel."

But once the transition in Damascus is complete, he said, they want Golan to "return to the homeland, Syria".

Israel conquered most of the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and annexed those areas in 1981, in a move only the United States has recognised.

Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate on temporary medical leave from prison, said in a video call released Thursday that she would never let prison silence her.

The 52-year-old has been jailed repeatedly over the past 25 years, most recently since November 2021, for past convictions relating to her advocacy against the obligatory hijab for women and capital punishment in Iran.

UN investigators say they have compiled secret lists of 4,000 perpetrators of serious crimes in Syria and hope the fall of Bashar al-Assad will help ensure accountability up to the highest level.

"It is very important that the top level perpetrators are brought to justice," said Linnea Arvidsson, who coordinates the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria (COI).

"The focus should be on those who carry the main responsibility for the violations that have been committed for so many years, rather than the lower-level perpetrators," she told AFP in an interview.

Pope Francis, who has recently intensified criticism of the Israeli offensive in Gaza, on Thursday received Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, with whom he discussed the "serious" humanitarian situation.

The pair, who have previously met several times, discussed peace efforts during a private half-hour audience according to the Vatican, which released images of them smiling together.

Abbas then met the Holy See's Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and the Vatican's equivalent of a foreign minister, Paul Richard Gallagher.