Israeli prosecutors on Monday charged a Druze resident of the occupied Golan Heights with spying for Syria, the Shin Bet internal security service said in a statement.

It said that Iyad Johari, from the border village of Majdal Shams, was charged with having contact with a foreign agent and passing information to the enemy.

The Vatican's envoy to Damascus on Monday urged religious leaders in Syria to appeal for an end to the violence, warning that the "cancer of conflict" was spreading across the country.

"With the weight of your moral authority, come together and issue in the name of God a unanimous and severe warning to all parties in the conflict to cease violence and repression," Archbishop Mario Zenari said on Vatican radio.

Syria's rebels distributed on Monday a "national salvation draft" proposal for a political transition in the country, bringing together military and civilian figures for a post-Bashar Assad phase.

The draft by the joint command of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) proposes the establishment of a higher defense council charged with creating a presidential council, which in turn would bring together a total of six military and civilian figures to lead a future transition.

Another brigadier general has defected from Syria's army to join the ranks of opposition fighters, pushing the total number of rebel generals based in Turkey to 28, a diplomatic source said Monday.

The general was accompanied by 11 other officers, the source added on condition of anonymity.

Turkey has sent a convoy of tanks, weapons and ground-to-air missile batteries to the border with Syria, adding to its already fortified defenses around the frontier, Anatolia reported Monday.

A convoy of armored combat vehicles, troops, ammunition and missile systems left southeastern city of Gaziantep to be deployed in Kilis city along the border with Syria, Anatolia said.

Syria has closed its embassy in Australia, officials said Monday, two months after Canberra expelled the country's top diplomat over one of the worst massacres of the more than year-long conflict.

"The Syrian Embassy in Canberra has closed," the mission said on its website.

Army chief Gen. Jean Qahwaji snapped back at his critics on Monday and said in his Order of the Day that the military won’t allow turning the nation into a battleground for Syrian differences.

“No matter where the situation in Syria leads to, the army will be in utmost readiness to play its role and assume its national responsibilities in accordance with the decisions of the political authority in limiting the repercussions of these events on Lebanon, protecting the residents of border regions and preventing strife,” Qahwaji said.

A man employed at Syria's embassy in Berlin will be tried for allegedly passing on information relating to opponents of Bashar Assad's regime, Germany's federal court told the DPA news agency Sunday.

Confirming previous reports in the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, the court said the Syrian man -- who has not been named -- was arrested in February and will be tried on 35 counts of espionage.

Government forces on Monday strafed rebel-held districts in Aleppo with helicopter gunships and pounded them with shelling on the third day of a pitched battle for Syria's commercial capital.

The fighting has sent some 200,000 civilians fleeing the northern city, according to the U.N., which warned of a looming humanitarian catastrophe, while France said it would call an urgent U.N. Security Council meeting on Syria.

France, which is taking over the U.N. Security Council's rotating presidency in August, will call an emergency ministerial meeting on Syria, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Monday.

Fabius told French radio station RTL he would chair the meeting himself and that it had to be held urgently to stop President Bashar Assad's regime carrying out further massacres in Syria.