The Vatican is sending a delegation to the Syria peace talks due to start in Switzerland on Wednesday, a spokesman said, following repeated calls by Pope Francis for an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated solution to the raging conflict.

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said Monsignor Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See's representative to the United Nations and Monsignor Alberto Ortega Martin, an official from the Vatican's Secretariat of State will attend.

Two Palestinian members of Islamic Jihad were killed in an Israeli air raid in the Gaza Strip overnight, witnesses and medical sources said Wednesday.

The two victims, Ahmad al Zaaneen, 21, and Mohammed al Zaaneen, 23, died when the car they were travelling in was hit near Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, the sources said.

An aide to Egypt's interim president said Tuesday the country will never return to the corruption and authoritarianism of dictator Hosni Mubarak, deposed in a popular uprising in 2011.

Mustaf Hegazy, speaking to foreign journalists in Cairo, said: "There is no room for extremism, fascism, corruption and autocracy to return.

The future role of Syrian President Bashar Assad is a "red line" for the government delegation in peace talks, the foreign minister said Tuesday on the eve of their opening.

"The issues of the president and the regime are red lines for us and for the Syrian people," the official SANA news agency quoted Walid Muallem as saying shortly before his delegation arrived in the Swiss city of Montreux for the talks.

Better known for its jazz festival and as the inspiration for rock anthem "Smoke on the Water", Swiss town Montreux is now the hub of efforts to end the war in Syria.

As Syria's government, the country's divided opposition and the international community gathered for talks, the picturesque lakeside town was locked down.

The United Nations human rights office expressed horror Tuesday at a report accusing the Syrian regime of killing and torture on an "industrial scale", saying the allegations must be investigated.

"This report is extremely alarming, and the alleged scale of the deaths in detention, if verified, is truly horrifying," Rupert Colville, spokesman for UN rights chief Navi Pillay, told AFP in an email.

Iraqi Kurdish leader Massud Barzani said Tuesday he expected very little from the Geneva II peace conference on Syria and warned of the dangers of extremist groups gaining ground.

"The Geneva II conference will be the opportunity for the Syrian people to decide their own destiny but personally, I am not very optimistic," Barzani told the foreign affairs committee of the European Parliament.

At least five people were killed and around 20 wounded as armed groups clashed in a western suburb of the Libyan capital on Tuesday, a medical source said.

A security source said the violence broke out during an operation against "armed gangs" including backers of Moammar Gadhafi's regime, ousted in a 2011 revolt.

A jihadist group based in Egypt's Sinai claimed responsibility Tuesday for firing rockets a day earlier at Israel's Red Sea resort of Eilat, calling the Jewish state the Muslim world's top enemy.

Al-Qaeda-inspired Ansar Beit al-Maqdis accused Israel of pressuring Cairo to wage a "war on Islam and Muslims in Egypt, particularly in the Sinai... to protect (Israeli) security."

Syria's Kurds named a municipal council Tuesday for one of three majority-Kurdish regions in the country's northeast, two months after they declared self-rule, an official said.

"We have named a municipal government for the Jazeera area," Saleh Muslim, head of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), told Agence France Presse.