After weeks of deadlock, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached an agreement with coalition partners on Thursday to form a new government that appears set to address pressing domestic issues while putting peacemaking with the Palestinians on the back burner.

The new government will be the first in years without ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties.

France and Britain are seeking to lift an EU embargo to enable them to arm Syrian rebels, arguing that Moscow's supply of weapons to Damascus is giving the regime an unfair edge, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Thursday.

His comments were welcomed by the Syrian opposition as a step in the right direction, but condemned by the regime of President Bashar Assad which said arming the rebels was "a flagrant violation" of international law.

The U.N. Security Council must refer war crimes committed by both sides in Syria's two-year conflict to the International Criminal Court, Amnesty International said on Thursday.

"How many more civilians must die before the U.N. Security Council refers the situation to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court so that there can be accountability for these horrendous crimes?" asked Ann Harrison, Amnesty's deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

The U.N. has halted peacekeeping patrols in the Golan Heights amid fears that fallout from the Syrian war could cause more countries to withdraw from its force, diplomats said Wednesday.

The abduction last week of 21 Philippine members of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), which has monitored a ceasefire zone between Syria and Israel since 1974, has heightened security fears.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to reach an agreement over the shape of his new government after resolving an 11th-hour crisis with a key centrist partner, media reports said on Wednesday.

The last-minute deal means Israel's new coalition government is likely to be sworn in just days before a top-level visit by U.S. President Barack Obama.

President Barack Obama Wednesday tapped a new ambassador to Libya, six months after the previous U.S. envoy was killed in a brutal militant attack which shocked America to its core.

The announcement that career diplomat Deborah Jones is set to replace slain ambassador, Chris Stevens, came as the Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan was in Washington for talks with senior officials.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Wednesday that arming Syrian rebels would breach international law, after Western powers dropped growing hints about giving military aid.

Speaking in London after talks with his British counterpart William Hague, Lavrov also reiterated that it was for Syrians to decide the future of President Bashar Assad.

The health of a Palestinian prisoner who has been on hunger strike for months took a turn for the worse on Wednesday, a lawyer for the Ramallah-based Prisoners' Club told Agence France Presse.

Samer Issawi, who has been refusing food since August, is currently being held in Kaplan hospital near Tel Aviv.

Britain's Prince Charles and his wife Camilla on Wednesday visited a camp for Syrian refugees in northern Jordan as part of a trip to the Middle East, an official said.

The royal couple toured the United Nations-run King Abdullah Park refugee camp near the border with Syria that hosts about 1,000 Syrians who have fled the war in their country, said the Jordanian government official.

Anti-regime activists took to the streets of rebel-held Mayadeen in eastern Syria on Wednesday for a third straight day to demand that jihadist al-Nusra Front fighters leave the town, a watchdog said.

"For the third day in a row, protests erupted in Mayadeen calling on the al-Nusra Front to leave the town," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.