Fighters in Bani Walid say they are ready to lay down their lives to defend the besieged town of jagged hilltops which gave shelter last year to loyalists of slain Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

"They'll have to march over our dead bodies to reach Bani Walid," said commander Salem Waer who is leading military operations in the oasis town circled by armed groups operating under orders of Libya's new authorities.

International peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi will visit Baghdad on Monday for talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki over the 19-month uprising in Syria, Maliki's spokesman said on Saturday.

"Iraq has said many times that it supports the efforts of Lakhdar Brahimi to find a solution, and we will work to make this mission successful to end the human tragedy of the Syrian people," Ali Mussawi said.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Saturday for reform to the U.N. Security Council to allow progress to resolve the Syria crisis which has been held up by veto powers Russia and China.

"If we must wait for one or two permanent members, then Syria's fate is really in great danger," Erdogan told a conference in Istanbul.

Violence in Syria has killed at least 33,082 people, most of them civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Saturday.

Some 1,000 people have been killed in the past five days alone, the Britain-based watchdog said.

Shootings and bomb attacks in and around Iraq's main northern city on Saturday killed two people, including a soldier, and wounded four others, security and medical officials said.

In a Kurdish-majority neighborhood in the east of Mosul, a civilian was killed in a drive-by shooting, according to Iraqi army Lieutenant Khaled Hamed and doctor Mahmud Haddad at the city's main hospital.

Syrian rebels blocked on Saturday army reinforcements advancing towards the town of Maaret al-Numan which has been under rebel control for nearly a week, an Agence France Presse journalist said.

In its bid to retake the town, strategically located in the northwest on the road from Turkey to the embattled city of Aleppo, the army used warplanes to bombard Maaret al-Numan, killing two civilians and destroying three homes.

The United States believes Iran was behind a major cyberattack on Saudi Arabia's state oil company and a Qatari gas firm, a former U.S. official who has worked on cybersecurity issues said Friday.

In a major cybersecurity speech on Thursday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued a veiled warning to Tehran that Washington is ready to take preemptive action to protect U.S. computer networks, the former official said.

The Israeli air force launched attacks at three sites in the Gaza Strip on Saturday morning, the military said, hours after a rocket fired from the enclave exploded near a house in southern Israel.

A statement from the army said that its "aircraft targeted a terror activity site in the northern Gaza Strip, and two terror activity sites in the central Gaza Strip. Direct hits were confirmed."

The army took a pounding at the hands of rebels in northern Syria, a watchdog said on Friday, as tensions between Damascus and Ankara escalated over cargo seized from a Syrian passenger plane.

A rebel offensive killed more than 130 soldiers in two days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi pledged on Friday to bring to justice Mubarak-era officials, a day after his bid to sack the top prosecutor infuriated a judiciary wary of its new Islamist leader.

Morsi reopened a rift with the judges on Thursday after trying to remove the state prosecutor following acquittals of ex-regime men accused of organizing an attack on protesters during last year's uprising against Hosni Mubarak.