Russian Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev warned that military escalation is likely in Iran, with "real danger" of a U.S. strike, in an interview published Thursday.

He added that Syria, which has refused to break its ties with Tehran, could also be a target for Western intervention.

Two Arab League monitors in Syria have quit, officials said on Thursday as the head of the operation accused an Algerian observer who resigned of making unfounded claims about the operation.

"Two monitors have excused themselves, an Algerian and an Sudanese," Syria operations chief Adnan Khodeir said at Arab League headquarters in Cairo.

Syrian security forces on Thursday shot dead 32 people across the country, activists said, as a rights group said troops opened fire on anti-regime protesters as they tried to approach Arab League monitors in the country’s northwest.

The Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said security forces killed 30 civilians and two army deserters in several regions.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon's fourth visit to Lebanon, which starts on Friday, is expected to focus on the controversial Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) and the deadly crisis in n Syria.

A government source told Agence France Presse that Ban was expected to address Lebanon's duties to the STL that has charged four Hizbullah operatives in the 2005 assassination of ex-Premier Rafik Hariri.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that President Bashar al-Assad gave a "chillingly, cynical speech" in which he tried to shift the blame for the violence in Syria.

"Instead of taking responsibility, what we hear from President Assad in his chillingly cynical speech yesterday was only making excuses blaming foreign countries," Clinton said.

Syrian security forces killed 21 civilians and were clashing with army deserters in a town near the central city of Hama on Wednesday, activists and a human rights group said.

Twenty-one civilians and three army deserters were killed at the hands of security forces, five of them under torture, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.

The Arab League is putting on hold a decision to send new observers to Syria after three monitors were slightly wounded in an attack this week, an official at the Cairo-based bloc said on Wednesday.

The official also dismissed remarks by an Algerian monitor who said he quit the Syria mission, accusing the regime of war crimes, saying all his claims were unfounded because he was bedridden and was never in the field.

A French journalist was killed on Wednesday in the flashpoint central Syrian city of Homs, the first Western journalist to be killed since protests erupted in March.

The public France 2 channel identified the slain journalist as Gilles Jacquier, one of its reporters. The 43-year-old joined public television in 1991 and was an award-winning veteran who had covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Israel.

Free Patriotic Movement MP Michel Aoun noted on Wednesday that attempts to create strife are taking place in Syria, praising President Bashar Assad’s efforts to implement reform.

He hoped that the “Syrian people would be diligent enough to thwart the strife.”

The March 14 General Secretariat condemned on Wednesday Syrian President Bashar Assad’s speech on Tuesday, urging the international and Arab communities to take action to halt the regime’s ongoing crimes.

It said in a statement after its weekly meeting: “The Lebanese government should distance the country from the Syrian crisis after Assad’s speech hinted at more violence on the internal scene.”