Syrian troops on Sunday killed two men as they tried to cross the border into neighboring Jordan, a local official said, as Syria’s state news agency said border guards killed a large number of "terrorists" who attempted to cross into Syria from Turkey.

"At least two men were shot dead by the Syrian army early this morning when they tried to cross the border into the kingdom, along with hundreds of Syrians," Zayed Hammad, head of the Ketab and Sunna Society, which provides aid to more than 50,000 Syrian refugees, told Agence France Presse.

Almost half of those killed in Syria since the outbreak of the anti-regime revolt in March 2011 have died since a failed U.N.-Arab League truce was due to come into force, a monitoring group said on Sunday.

"Some 45 percent of those killed in Syria have been killed since April 12," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Unknown gunmen kidnapped on Sunday an Italian embassy security agent in Sanaa, a Western diplomat and a Yemeni security official said.

The man was taken hostage from a street close to the mission in Hadda neighborhood in southwestern Sanaa, the diplomat said, requesting anonymity.

Libya's General National Congress, which will become the first elected body to rule the oil-rich nation after Moammar Gadhafi’s ouster, is due to take power early August, an official said Sunday.

"August 8 is expected to be the date on which power is transferred from the National Transitional Council to the General National Congress," said Othman Ben Sassi, a member of the outgoing NTC.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that international sanctions have so far made no impact on Iran's nuclear program and that a "strong and credible" military threat was needed.

"We have to be honest and say that all the sanctions and diplomacy so far have not set back the Iranian program by one iota," he said on meeting White House hopeful Mitt Romney.

Pope Benedict XVI launched an urgent appeal for an end to bloodshed in Syria on Sunday, calling on the international community to do everything to help resolve the conflict.

"I continue to follow with alarm that tragic and growing episodes of violence in Syria with the sad succession of deaths and injuries," the pope said following his weekly angelus prayers at his summer residence near Rome.

Israeli police barred a traditional iftar meal for breaking the Ramadan fast which was to take place at an east Jerusalem hotel on grounds it had been organized by Hamas, a Palestinian activist said on Sunday.

During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began last weekend, Muslims are expected to abstain from food, drink and sex from dawn until sunset, when they break their fast with a meal known as iftar.

A high-ranking Iraqi official on Sunday said security agencies have uncovered a secret weapons deal between the autonomous Kurdistan region and an unnamed foreign country.

"Iraqi security agencies (discovered) a secret weapons deal between the president of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, Massud Barzani, and a foreign country," the security official told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

A booby-trapped parcel has killed the son of a Yemeni tribal chief in an attack suspected to be the work of al-Qaida, police said on Sunday.

Ali Dahab, 14, died instantly when the parcel exploded after it was given to him to pass to his father, Sheikh Majed, as a present, police said in a statement carried by the official Saba news agency.

Aleppo, the latest battleground in Syria's 16-month uprising, will be the Syrian army's "graveyard," said Colonel Abdel Jabbar al-Oqaidi, the head of the rebels in the city.

It is pitch black as he arrives at an isolated farmhouse surrounded by olive groves in northern Syria for an interview with an Agence France Presse correspondent.