North Lebanon's border with Syria was hit on Monday night by cross-border shelling following an exchange of gunfire, a security official told Agence France Presse.

This is the latest of a series of border incidents in recent weeks.

Russia on Monday blocked a proposed U.N. Security Council statement on mass killings in the Syrian village of Treimsa, diplomats said amid worsening deadlock over international action on the conflict.

Russian envoys opposed the statement saying it was not clear what had happened, council diplomats told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

European Union foreign ministers plan to adopt fresh sanctions against President Bashar Assad's regime at talks next week, EU diplomats told Agence France Presse on Monday.

Several sources said on condition of anonymity that the EU's 27 foreign ministers would add to an existing EU blacklist of 129 people and 49 entities, or firms, when they meet in Brussels on Monday.

The 15 fighters who call themselves "Soldiers of the Prophet Mohammed" are not afraid of dying at the hands of the troops of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Their charismatic leader Abu Saeed says that for one month now, the army has laid siege to the rebels in the Wastani mountains overlooking the town of Jisr al-Shughour in the northwestern province of Idlib.

President Michel Suleiman is scheduled to travel Tuesday to Turkey in light of positive signals received by Lebanese officials about the case of the 11 Lebanese pilgrims abducted in Syria, the Central News Agency reported on Monday.

Suleiman’s trip may carry “a happy surprise for the Lebanese in general and the abductees’ families in particular, knowing that the visitors of Baabda Palace have recently quoted President Suleiman as saying that he will not visit Turkey except after receiving confirmed information about the possibility of freeing them or setting a date for that,” well-informed sources told the agency.

A Syrian force infiltrated the area of al-Qaa in Lebanon as rockets fired in clashes on the Syrian side of the border fell in the area.

Voice of Lebanon radio reported that the Syrian unit entered al-Qaa under the cover of artillery and rocket fires.

The Damascus regime is guilty of "tremendous political obstruction" that is preventing aid reaching an estimated 850,000 people in need in Syria, a top U.N. relief official said on Monday.

Launching an appeal to help Syrians both at home and abroad, U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) director of operations John Ging accused the regime of blocking visas for some aid workers.

Syria's Muslim Brotherhood began Monday a two-day meeting on the outskirts of Istanbul focusing on ways to support the uprising against the regime in Damascus, a member of the organization said.

"It is the first meeting of the organization after more than 30 years," since many of its members fled Syria following a revolt that was violently suppressed in 1982, Omar Mushaweh, representative of the Muslim Brotherhood within the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group, told Agence France Presse.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat slammed on Monday the Syrian regime’s “latest massacre” in the town of Treimsa, accusing it of seeking to “systematically destroy the country and lead it to fragmentation.”

He said in his weekly editorial in the PSP-affiliated al-Anbaa magazine: “The Syrian people will be victorious in their revolt despite the international and Arab silence over their plight.”

Dialogue is no longer a solution to ending the slaughter in Syria and the United Nations' Security Council must step in, Jordan's Prime Minister Fayez Tarawneh said in the Czech capital Prague Monday.

"It's impossible to resolve the situation in Syria through a dialogue today," Tarawneh said following talks with Czech counterpart Petr Necas.