Human Rights Watch on Sunday accused the Syrian air force of using cluster bombs against rebels and in populated areas across the country.

"Syria’s disregard for its civilian population is all too evident in its air campaign, which now apparently includes dropping these deadly cluster bombs into populated areas," said Steve Goose, arms director at the New York-based group.

Syrian fighter jets flew over parts of the Bekaa region in eastern Lebanon on Sunday, media reports said.

Voice of Lebanon radio (100.5) said that the jets flew over the outskirts of the town of Arsal.

Head of the Syrian National Council Abdel Basset Sayda demanded that Hizbullah and Iran refrain from meddling in the Syrian revolt against President Bashar Assad and his regime, reported the Kuwaiti al-Seyassah daily on Sunday.

He urged Hizbullah to “prepare for the post-Assad phase.”

Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour stressed that Lebanon is not violating United Nations Security Council resolution 1701, saying Israel has violated the resolution “tens of thousands of times” since its adoption in 2006.

He told the daily: “Hizbullah's unmanned drone that flew over Israel recently does not violate the resolution.”

Syria banned Turkish flights from its airspace on Sunday and Turkey made a similar tit-for-tat move, as regime forces counter-attacked rebels to regain territory lost in northern battlegrounds.

The reprisal for Turkey confiscating a cargo of what Russia said was radar equipment being flown from Moscow to Damascus came despite a flurry of diplomacy intended to calm soaring tensions between the neighbors.

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.

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 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.