Syrian warplanes Wednesday blitzed rebel targets around the strategic northern town of Maaret al-Numan while ground forces shelled opposition belts outside the capital Damascus, a watchdog said.

"The Syrian airforce have made no less than six sorties early morning, pounding the villages of Deir Sharqi, Maarhtat and Bsida, east of Maaret al-Numan," which rebels captured a week ago, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Turkey's Kurdish rebels will retaliate to any Turkish attacks on Kurds in war-torn Syria, the second in command of the outlawed PKK said in an interview published Wednesday.

"Turkey should stay out of this conflict and stop its scheming," Murat Karayilan, who heads the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the absence of its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan, told Swiss daily Le Temps.

Britain will close its full consulate in the southern Iraqi city of Basra as part of government austerity measures, Foreign Secretary William Hague said Monday.

The Foreign Office will keep an office in Basra, which was under British command following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but there will be no permanent staffing, Hague said.

New evidence implicating militias in executions after ousted Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi was captured and killed in Sirte last October 20 raises fresh questions over his death, a watchdog said on Wednesday.

"The evidence suggests that opposition militias summarily executed at least 66 captured members of Gadhafi's convoy in Sirte," his home town, said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Israeli airplanes carried out a sortie in the Gaza Strip early Wednesday morning, the army said, hours after a rocket from the enclave exploded in southern Israel.

Military "aircraft targeted a terror activity site in the northern Gaza Strip. A direct hit was confirmed," a statement read.

Foreign militants fighting in Syria could contribute to an increased "radicalization" of the conflict, members of a U.N. commission investigating rights abuses in the war-torn country said Tuesday.

"The presence of foreign militants, radical Islamists or jihadists, worries us very much," commission head Paulo Sergio Pinheiro told reporters, estimating there were hundreds of foreign combatants on the ground in Syria.

British police on Tuesday charged a man with kidnapping two Western journalists in Syria, one week after he was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport, Scotland Yard said.

Shajul Islam, 26, is alleged to have "unlawfully and injuriously imprisoned" photographers John Cantlie from Britain, and Jeroen Oerlemans from the Netherlands, between July 17 and 26, it said in a statement.

Pope Benedict XVI will send a delegation to the Syrian capital to "express his brotherly solidarity with the entire population", the Vatican said Tuesday.

"We cannot be mere spectators to the tragedy taking place in Syria," the Holy See's number two official, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said during a global synod of Catholic bishops at the Vatican.

The Syrian government is interested in exploring a ceasefire in the 19-month conflict as proposed by international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, foreign ministry spokesman Jihad Maqdisi said on Tuesday, as the opposition Syrian National Council said it “would welcome any halt to the killings.”

Maqdisi stressed that for a halt to the violence, the rebels and their backers would need to be involved too.

Syria will hold by-elections on December 1 to fill five seats in parliament, two of which became vacant when sitting MPs defected to the opposition, state news agency SANA said.

"President Bashar Assad has passed a decree calling for the organization of parliamentary elections for December 1 to fill five empty seats," SANA said.