The Turkish army returned fire after shots were fired at military targets from across the border with Syria, the military said in a statement Tuesday.

"A group on the Syrian side of the border fired 60 shots at an armored personnel carrier and tactical vehicles... which was reciprocated in kind" late on Monday, it said, adding that there was no damage or casualties.

Kuwait said on Tuesday that barring foreigners from attending public hospitals in the mornings was aimed at resolving the problem of "overcrowding" at such health facilities.

Since Sunday the health ministry in the oil-rich Gulf state began implementing the measure, described by activists as racist, at the public hospital in Jahra, west of Kuwait City, on experimental basis for six months.

Jordanian prosecutors on Tuesday charged 13 men with carrying out "terrorist" acts for their alleged roles in riots in the southern city of Maan over a double murder there.

Military state security court prosecutors accused the 13 suspects from the restive city of carrying out "terrorist acts by using flammable materials (in the riots) as well as rioting and unlawful assembly," a court official told Agence France Presse.

Incoming Palestinian prime minister Rami Hamdallah, who has been tasked with forming a new government, is likely to present his cabinet line-up "in the coming few days," president Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday.

"I asked him to form a new government and in the coming few days, he will finish his consultations and declare a new government," Abbas told reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, just two days after he tasked the respected academic with piecing together a new cabinet.

Syrians trying to flee their conflict-ravaged homeland are facing growing difficulties as they try to get to neighboring Iraq, Turkey and Jordan, the U.N.'s refugee agency warned Tuesday.

"We call on all parties in the conflict to enable people to leave, and on countries in the region to keep their borders open," UNHCR spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told Agence France Presse.

Shellfire near the Russian embassy in Damascus killed a civilian and wounded a member of the security forces on Tuesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.

"It was recorded that five shells hit the Al-Adwi area of Damascus," the Britain-based watchdog said.

Israeli bulldozers demolished four homes on Tuesday in an area of the Jordan Valley just north of Jericho that is supposed to be under full Palestinian control, the family and the city's Palestinian governor said.

The Israeli defense ministry confirmed the demolitions in Al-Nuweima but did not specify whether the houses lay in so-called Area A of the occupied West Bank, lands on which the Palestinians are supposed to enjoy full civil and security control.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday Moscow had not yet delivered its sophisticated S-300 missiles to the Damascus regime despite hints from Syrian President Bashar Assad that such shipments had already been made.

"The contract was signed several years ago. It has not been realized yet," Putin said at a joint press conference with EU leaders. "We do not want to upset the balance in the region."

Syrian government forces have pushed rebels battling to topple President Bashar Assad out of a key district on the edge of Damascus, the country's state news agency reported Tuesday.

If confirmed, the regime's latest gain would bolster the defenses of the Syrian capital and further shift the balance of power Assad's way in the civil war.

A Cairo court on Tuesday sentenced 43 Egyptian and foreign NGO workers to jail terms ranging from one to five years for working illegally, causing outrage abroad and raising fears for the future of civil society work.

The sentences follow trials which came in the wake of raids in 2011 on the offices of foreign NGOs, many which had operated without licences under ousted president Hosni Mubarak but which the new authorities deemed were receiving funds illicitly.