Turkey's top military commander on Wednesday warned of a stronger response if Syrian shells continued to land on Turkish soil, the private NTV television network reported amid fears of a cross-border escalation of Syria's civil war.

"We have retaliated (for Syrian shelling) and if it continues, we'll respond more strongly," Armed forces chief of staff General Necdet Ozel said in Akcakale, a border town where five civilians were killed by Syrian shelling last week.

Syrian forces on Wednesday hammered rebel belts in the central city of Homs, where besieged residents desperately pleaded for humanitarian assistance, and in the northern city of Aleppo, a watchdog said.

Shells rained down from early morning on parts of Homs and on the nearby town of Qusayr, near the Lebanon border, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The U.S. military has sent a task force to Jordan to help it handle an influx of Syrian refugees and prepare for scenarios including loose chemical weapons, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

The Times said the 150-strong force of planners and specialists -- led by a senior U.S. officer -- was looking at ways to prevent the increasingly bloody Syrian civil war from spilling across Jordan's borders.

The chief of U.S. intelligence has rejected criticism over how spy agencies responded to a deadly attack on diplomats in Libya and said there was no clear warning before the onslaught.

Pushing back against allegations from Republican lawmakers, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested Tuesday it was naive to believe the government could have quickly arrived at a definitive explanation of last month's attack on the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.

British police on Wednesday said they had arrested two people at London's Heathrow Airport on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.

A man and a woman, both aged 26, were detained by officers from the counter-terrorism command at 8.30 pm (1930 GMT) Tuesday after arriving on a flight into the airport, according to a Metropolitan Police statement.

The Israeli air force pounded targets in the northern Gaza Strip early on Wednesday, without causing casualties, following rocket fire on southern Israel, sources on both sides said.

Palestinian security sources confirmed the strike had hit a training camp in Beit Lahiya which was used by fighters from the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the ruling Hamas movement.

President Hugo Chavez vowed Tuesday to keep supporting Bashar Assad, calling him Syria's legitimate president and blaming the United States for the war that has raged on for nearly 19 months.

"How can I not support the government of Bashar Assad if it is the legitimate government of Syria?" asked Chavez, who was re-elected Sunday to a third term.

The first formal camp inside Syria for civilians driven from their homes by the nearly 19-month conflict began admitting displaced families on Tuesday, Agence France Presse reported.

The new camp, just a stone's throw from the Turkish border, opened its doors amid mounting pressure from Ankara for the international community to do more for the displaced inside Syria to stem any new exodus of refugees.

The trial of a Tunisian blogger who has voiced fears of creeping Islamization and is charged with drunkenness and indecency during Ramadan was adjourned on Tuesday, Agence France Presse reported.

At the hearing in Menzel Temime, 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Tunis, the prosecution announced that Sofiane Shurabi and his journalist friend Mehdi Jelassi would be tried for drunkenness and indecency.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday called an early general election, saying it should be held "as quickly as possible" in a bid to avoid damaging the Jewish state's flagging economy.

"My duty as prime minister is to put the national interest before everything, and so I've decided that for the good of Israel we must go to an election now as fast as possible," he told a press conference, broadcast live on Israel's main television and radio stations.