The United States said Monday it would welcome a plan for Syria to hand over its chemical weapons but expressed skepticism at the Russian initiative, which is designed to head off American air strikes.

However, the U.S. Senate announced later on Monday that it will hold a procedural vote Wednesday on a measure authorizing President Barack Obama to use military force against Syria.

The White House on Monday said an additional 14 nations had signed up to a list of countries supporting a "strong international response" to what it says is Syria's use of chemical weapons.

The statement was put together at the G20 summit in Russia last week, and originally included 10 nations plus the United States.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was under fire Monday for saying that a proposed U.S. military strike on Syria would be "unbelievably small."

The comment came as Kerry ended a whirlwind diplomatic offensive in Europe aimed at whipping up support abroad for U.S. military action against the Damascus regime, accused of using chemical weapons against its people.

Egypt's military says it has seized caches of weapons in a Sinai operation including a mortar apparently belonging to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group in neighboring Gaza.

The military has launched a sweeping offensive in the north of the peninsula to quell an Islamist militant insurgency that surged after the army deposed president Mohammed Morsi in July.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Monday called for the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons in internationally supervised safe zones.

Ban told reporters he may propose the zones to the U.N. Security Council if U.N. inspectors confirm the use of the banned weapons. He said it would also be a bid to overcome the 15-nation council's "embarrassing paralysis" over the Syria conflict.

British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday welcomed a Russian proposal that Syria hand over its chemical weapons to avoid U.S. military action, but warned against the offer being used to distract from the wider conflict.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had earlier called on the Assad regime to hand over control of its chemical weapons and have them destroyed, a proposal welcomed by his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Muallem.

Algerian troops have killed two armed Islamists east of the capital, the defense ministry said on Monday, as media reported an attack on a military convoy left two soldiers dead.

The ministry said two Islamists were killed in separate operations on Sunday evening, one of them during clashes with security forces in the Tadmait area of Tizi Ouzou, about 110 kilometers (70 miles) from Algiers.

Syrian President Bashar Assad's foreign minister on Monday welcomed Russia's proposal that Damascus hand over control of its chemical weapons arsenal to international supervision to avoid U.S. military action.

"I carefully listened to (Russian foreign minister) Sergei Lavrov's statement about it. In connection with this, I note that Syria welcomes the Russian initiative based on the Syrian leadership's concern about the lives of our nationals and the security of our country," Walid al-Muallem said in televised comments.

One Iranian was killed and another wounded in an exchange of fire between Saudi coastguards and a boat containing drugs smugglers, the official SPA news agency reported on Monday.

It said the clash took place on Friday when the coastguards intercepted a vessel with three Iranians and a Saudi on board that was attempting to run drugs into the kingdom off the Eastern Province.

The U.S. and Russia clashed at the U.N. atomic agency Monday over Moscow's request for an IAEA probe into the risks posed by U.S. airstrikes hitting a small Syrian reactor.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, said meanwhile that there was "not a big amount" of radioactive material at the research reactor in the suburbs of Damascus.