Malala calls for "books not bullets" as she celebrates her 18th birthday

Malala Yousafzai, the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has marked her 18th birthday by opening a school for Syrian refugee girls in Lebanon and calling on world leaders to invest in "books not bullets".

Speaking at the opening of the school Malala described the situation in neighbouring Syria as a "heartbreaking tragedy".

The Malala Fund, a non-profit organisation that supports a number of education projects, paid for the school, which will educate up 200 girls aged 14 to 18 at a time, in the Bekaa Valley, close to the Syrian border.

There are currently 1.2 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon and of those 500,000 are school-age children. But only around a fifth of them go to school.

Malala was greeted with songs and a birthday cake by the girls and moved to tears by their welcome.

She felt honoured to spend her birthday - the third annual Malala Day - with "brave and inspiring" girls from Syria.

Malala's call for world leaders to invest in education, to favour books not bullets prompted the hashtag #booksnotbullets, with people around the world sharing photos of themselves reading.