Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblat said Saturday that Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah should have announced his backing for the Syrian people rather than defending the Assad regime.

“I would have hoped that for Syria’s sake he would directly address (President) Bashar Assad and tell him that Syria is more important” than anything else, Jumblat told As Safir daily.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton denounced the arrest of blogger Razan Ghazzawi, rights campaigner Mazen Darwish and several other Syrian activists, calling Friday for their immediate release.

A statement from her office said she "deplores the arrest on Thursday by Syrian security forces" of Darwish, Ghazzawi and at least 12 others including Darwish's wife.

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad said on Friday that reforms have to be synchronized with a return to peace in the unrest-swept country, state media reported.

Assad, in remarks to visiting Mauritanian Prime Minister Moulaye Ould Mohamed Laghdaf, said that reforms and a "return to peace" must be concurrent in Syria, according to the official SANA news agency.

The Syrian National Council, the largest opposition group in the strife-ridden country, will not be officially represented at a "friends of Syria" conference next week, host Tunisia said on Friday.

"There will certainly not be an official SNC representative" at the conference, Foreign Minister Rafik Abdesalem told reporters while recognizing that the topic had caused wide debate.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat stressed the need for exerting political and humanitarian efforts to end the crisis in Syria, announced the PSP in a statement on Thursday.

He said after holding talks with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Turkey: “The political solution alone will end the Syrian regime’s violence” against protesters.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea slammed on Friday Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s accusations that the March 14 camp is placing conditions on resuming the national dialogue.

He said during the launch of the LF charter: “We do not set conditions on the talks and you have never even seriously approached the national dialogue.”

Thousands of Syrians rallied Friday to demand President Bashar al-Assad's ouster, as the embattled leader's forces unleashed their heaviest pounding yet of Homs in a brutal bid to crush dissent and killed 39 people across the country, monitors said.

The 39 victims included 12 dissident soldiers who were summarily executed at the hands of regime troops in the southern province of Daraa, the cradle of the revolution, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.

Amnesty International said the resolution passed by the U.N. General Assembly condemning the Syrian regime for its deadly crackdown on dissent sends "a clear and unequivocal message" that the violence must end.

In a strongly worded resolution adopted by a 137-12 vote on Thursday, U.N. member states demanded that President Bashar Assad's regime stop attacking civilian demonstrators and start pulling its troops back to barracks.

New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who strove to capture untold stories in Middle East conflicts from Libya to Iraq, died Thursday in eastern Syria after slipping into the country to report on the uprising against its president.

Shadid, shot in the West Bank in 2002 and kidnapped for six days in Libya last year, apparently died of an asthma attack, the Times said. Times photographer Tyler Hicks was with him and carried his body to Turkey, the newspaper said.

The U.N. General Assembly voted 137 to 12 on Thursday to approve a resolution calling for an immediate halt to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's violent crackdown on dissent.

China, Russia and Iran were among the nations that opposed the text.