The U.N. Security Council is to hold its first meeting with the Syrian National Coalition leadership in New York on Friday, Britain announced.

The Syrian delegation, which is about to start a tour of European capitals, will be led by coalition chief Ahmad Assi Jarba, but could also include opposition military leaders.

Two senior U.N. officials who will travel to Damascus for talks on the purported use of chemical weapons in Syria's conflict arrived in Beirut on Tuesday, an airport official said.

Swedish scientist "Ake Sellstrom and Angela Kane (the U.N. high representative for disarmament) arrived this afternoon in Beirut from Paris," the official said on condition of anonymity.

Syrian Kurds made rapid advances in the north on Tuesday, expelling jihadists from a string of villages, as mistrust between Kurds and Arabs grows, a watchdog and activists said.

Fighting hit a series of ethnically mixed villages in the northern province of Raqa on the border with Turkey, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is pushing for comprehensive guidelines to introduce separate labeling for products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Ashton sent a letter to European commissioners urging them to draft the guidelines by the end of 2013, the Haaretz newspaper said.

An Al-Qaida front group on Tuesday claimed brazen assaults on Iraqi prisons that freed hundreds of militants including top leaders, killed over 40 people and threaten to further erode confidence in the government.

The attacks on the prisons in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, and Taji, north of the capital, illustrate the growing reach of militants in Iraq and the deteriorating security situation in the country, where more than 600 people have been killed in violence so far this month.

Four Syrians including an eight-year-old girl were brought to a hospital in Israel after they were wounded by fighting in the war-torn country, a medical source said on Tuesday.

"Yesterday night an injured eight-year-old girl and her 48-year-old mother were treated for fractures to their arms and legs from shrapnel," said a spokesman for Ziv hospital, which is located north of the Sea of Galilee.

Pressure grew Tuesday on Egypt's new leaders to release Mohamed Morsi from detention as clashes between supporters and opponents of the deposed Islamist president left 10 people dead.

The deadly clashes which also wounded dozens broke out on Monday, raged through the night and were continuing on Tuesday, a day after Morsi's family vowed to sue the military over his ouster.

U.N. peace envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi said Monday he was pressing on with plans for a conference aimed at ending the fighting, though no firm date is in sight.

"It is extremely difficult to bring people who have been killing one another for two years just by a magic wand to a conference like this. It will take time, but I hope it will happen," Brahimi told a handful of reporters on the sidelines of an event in Washington.

The top U.S. general has informed Congress of options for military intervention in Syria, but stressed that the decision of whether to go to war was one for civilian leaders.

In a non-classified letter made public Monday, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey set out five options -- from nonlethal intelligence and weapons training to a boots-on-the-ground plan to "assault and secure" the Syrian regime's chemical weapons.

Secretary of State John Kerry is finalizing his selection of a team to help shepherd Middle East peace talks on a day to day basis, a U.S. official said Monday.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki would neither confirm nor deny reports that a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, has been chosen to head up the U.S. negotiating team.