Israel on Friday closed off the Palestinian territories for 48 hours, ahead of the solemn Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur which begins at sunset.

A military spokesman told Agence France Presse that crossings were closed from midnight Thursday and would reopen at midnight on Saturday.

President Vladimir Putin on Friday won the support of Iran and China at a regional summit on Russia's initiative for Syria to hand over its chemical weapons, which he said had proved the "serious intentions" of the Damascus regime.

Putin attended the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional security group sometimes seen as an eastern counterweight to NATO, in Kyrgyzstan a day after President Bashar Assad said he supported the Russian plan.

Syrian regime forces executed at least 248 people in the villages of Bayda and Banias earlier this year, Human Rights Watch said Friday, calling for Damascus to be held accountable.

In a report, the New York-based rights group said it had compiled a list of the names of 248 people killed in the two villages in coastal Tartus province on May 2 and 3.

Syria has scattered its stockpile of chemical weapons to as many as 50 sites in a bid to complicate U.S. efforts to track them, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

A secretive Syrian military unit had been given responsibility to shift the arsenal of poison gases and munitions, raising questions about the viability of a Russian plan to secure the weapons, the report said, citing U.S. and Middle Eastern officials.

Syria on Thursday sought membership of the global convention banning chemical weapons, in a move that could help head off a western military strike.

Damascus said it now considers itself a full member of the convention. While U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon welcomed the application, the United Nations would not immediately confirm it had been accepted.

The United States called again Thursday on Egypt's interim authorities to lift a state of emergency in force since August, which Cairo said it is extending for two months.

"We remain opposed, as we have from the beginning, to the state of emergency. And we urge the interim government to end it immediately," State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters.

A little known jihadist group in Egypt's Sinai on Thursday claimed responsibility for two car bombings that killed six Egyptian soldiers a day earlier in the border town of Rafah.

Jund al-Islam, or Islam's Soldiers in English, made the claim in a statement posted on militant Islamist forums.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius will visit China to discuss Syria on Sunday, his ministry said, amid ongoing diplomatic efforts to end the crisis in the war-torn country.

On his way back, Fabius will hold talks on Tuesday with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, said Philippe Lalliot, a foreign ministry spokesman.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday that Syria handing over chemical weapons and joining the treaty banning them would make U.S. strikes against the country "unnecessary," as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry rejected a 30-day timetable suggested by Syrian President Bashar Assad to begin submitting data on his chemical arsenal.

Lavrov told journalists ahead of talks with Kerry that their goal is to agree how to "solve once and for all the problem of chemical weapons in Syria" through the country's joining of the chemical weapons convention.

Two Egyptian army tanks crossed an initial border fence leading to Gaza for the first time on Thursday, witnesses said, but did not enter the Palestinian territory itself.

Gaza's Hamas rulers neither confirmed nor denied the incursion, but said no Egyptian tanks had entered the besieged Strip.