Iran is working round the clock to enlarge its nuclear infrastructure with the eventual aim of developing an industry capable of building up to 30 bombs a year, an Israeli minister charged on Monday.

Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said Tehran was "very close" to crossing the red line laid out by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year.

A wave of attacks on Monday, mostly against Sunni areas of Iraq, killed 70 people in renewed bloodshed that, coupled with widespread political paralysis, has revived fears of all-out sectarian war.

The violence, which left more than 230 people wounded, came after several days of relative calm following symbolic moves by Iraq's political leaders to ease tensions among the country's communities after the U.N. warned violence was ready to "explode".

Palestinian preconditions for peace talks make a return to negotiations impossible for Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.

"To me the setting of preconditions is an insurmountable obstacle," Netanyahu told the foreign affairs and defense committee, a parliamentary statement said.

Syrian President Bashar Assad may succeed in crushing the two-year-old uprising against his rule with the support of Iran and Hizbullah fighters, Israel's intelligence minister said on Monday.

"It might be the case that, at the end of the day, Assad .. might get the upper hand," he told a meeting of the Foreign Press Association. "I think that this is possible.

Twenty victims of a deadly 1988 gas attack on Iraq's Kurdish town of Halabja filed a complaint in Paris Monday in a bid to shine the light on firms that helped Saddam Hussein's regime build a chemical arsenal.

Four of the victims made the trip, two of whom suffer from severe respiratory problems since the bombing which killed some 5,000 Kurds, in what is thought to have been the worst ever gas attack targeting civilians.

Syria's main opposition group lashed out Monday at the execution a day earlier of a 15-year-old child at the hands of unidentified Islamist gunmen who accused him of blasphemy.

"The National Coalition condemns every act that violates the Syrian people's values and the principles of the (rebel) Free Syrian Army," the group said in a statement.

A young Belgian man has been killed in Syria while fighting for an Islamist group and his brother was arrested on his return home from the war-stricken country, newspapers said Monday.

Belgian authorities and Islamic groups have become increasingly concerned about a growing number of young men leaving to fight in Syria against the regime of President Bashar Assad, some of whom are suspected of war crimes.

Egypt's foreign minister is to hold talks in Addis Ababa on Ethiopia's plan to build a Nile dam that has stirred "life or death" concerns over water resources, the premier announced Monday.

Hisham Qandil told the Senate, taking the place of parliament until a new National Assembly is elected, that Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel Amr would travel to Ethiopia "in the coming days to give the Egyptian point of view" on the project.

Labor rights in Iran are under threat as Western sanctions take their toll on the economy, sharply reducing the purchasing power of workers, the International Federation for Human Rights warned on Monday.

"Unemployment is on the rise, inflation is at unprecedented levels and most people have to combine several jobs because the minimum wage is insufficient to counterbalance inflation," the group said.

A Kuwaiti court jailed a woman for 11 years on Monday for posting remarks on Twitter deemed insulting to the emir and calling for the overthrow of the regime, said the verdict.

With the ruling, Huda al-Ajmi will become the first woman to go to jail in Kuwait over the use of Twitter after receiving the longest sentence for online dissent in the Gulf state.