The Syrian army launched an intense bombardment Friday of one of the last areas under rebel control in the Qalamoun mountains north of Damascus, a monitoring group said.

Shelling of rebel positions in the town of Nabuk began before dawn, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Syrian refugee children are paying a cruel price as civil war rips their country apart, the United Nations warned Friday in a report with heart-rending testimony from youngsters driven from their homes.

"This is impossible to forget. It's like someone has stabbed me with a knife when I remember," 15-year-old Taha, who saw seven corpses near his house in Syria, told interviewers with the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR).

Iran's landmark nuclear deal is "a great opportunity" for expanding strained ties between Tehran and the United Arab Emirates, President Hassan Rouhani said Thursday.

Iran struck a breakthrough deal with the United States and five other Western powers on Sunday, accepting strict constraints on its nuclear program for the first time in a decade in exchange for partial sanctions relief.

A Palestinian shot in a 2012 clash with Israeli troops died of his injuries in an Israeli hospital on Thursday, Palestinian security officials told Agence France Presse.

They named the man as Mahmud Waji Awad, 24, and said he was shot in the West Bank's Qalandiya camp, between Ramallah and Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, about a year ago.

A student was killed during an Islamist demonstration at Cairo University Thursday, officials said, as Egyptian authorities continued their crackdown on supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi.

The dead man was Mohammed Reda Mohammed Abdo, 19, a second-year engineering student, said senior health ministry official Ahmed al-Ansari and forensic authority spokesman Hisham Abdul Hamid.

A 5.7 magnitude earthquake on the Gulf coast near Iran's sole nuclear power plant killed seven people and injured 30 on Thursday, emergency response chief Hassan Qadami told state media.

"So far, there are seven dead and 30 injured receiving hospital treatment," the official IRNA news agency quoted Qadami as saying.

One Syrian was killed and nine others were injured on Thursday when mortar fire struck the Russian embassy in Damascus, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

It added that no Russian nationals were hurt in the attack by suspected rebels and that the building suffered little damage.

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres warned on Thursday that regional countries hosting hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees need "massive" international aid to help them cope with the influx.

"Without a much more massive support to the countries in the region, Jordan, Lebanon and others, the international community cannot take for granted that these countries will be able to go on, accepting more and more hundreds of thousands or millions of Syrians refugees," Guterres told reporters in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Three Libyan soldiers were killed and three wounded in new fighting in the restive eastern city of Benghazi Thursday as the army clashed with an armed group, a medic said.

"Three soldiers were killed and three wounded soldiers were admitted to the hospital," said Al-Jala hospital spokeswoman Fadia al-Barghathi.

An Israeli court on Thursday jailed six Arab citizens for killing a far-right soldier after he slew four Arabs and wounded more than 20 in a 2005 shooting spree.

Three of the men received two-year prison sentences and the others got terms ranging from 11-20 months, documents published by the Haifa district court showed.