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.

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.

Israeli soldiers shot dead one Palestinian and wounded two others early Monday at a checkpoint near East Jerusalem, Palestinian medical and security sources said.

The victim, 40-year-old Akram Dair from a village in the West Bank near Ramallah, was driving in a car with two other Palestinians when border guards opened fire at them, the sources said.

French freelance reporter Pierre Torres, who filed copy for several media networks including Agence France Presse, was wounded in Aleppo on Sunday as Syrian troops pushed an assault on rebels, a colleague said.

Torres, 28, was hit by a bullet in the shoulder, according to a Spanish freelance journalist who has seen his injury.

Bombings in Iraq killed six people on Sunday, including two policemen, and wounded 21 others, security and medical officials said.

A car bomb in a market in al-Muqdadiyah, 90 kilometers (55 miles) northeast of Baghdad, killed four people and wounded 13 others, a local police officer and a doctor said.

The United Nations said Sunday that 200,000 people have fled the Syrian city of Aleppo in two days as President Bashar Assad's forces step up their assault.

U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said in a statement that an unknown number of people are trapped in the city and appealed for safe access to Aleppo for aid groups.