Gunmen shot dead two Iraqi army soldiers, including a lieutenant, in a drive-by shooting in north Baghdad on Tuesday, security and medical officials said.

The gunmen, who were driving in two cars, opened fire using silenced pistols on a military pick-up truck in Waziriyah, killing the two, an interior ministry official and a medical source said.

The number of Syrians fleeing to the al-Zaatri refugee camp in Jordan has doubled in recent days, with more than 10,000 taking shelter there, the U.N. refugee agency said on Tuesday.

"The pace of arrivals from the Syrian border to the Zaatri camp in north Jordan has doubled in the past week," Melissa Flemming, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, told a press conference.

Vice President Farouq al-Shara said it would be a "mistake" to keep Iran out of international efforts to end the Syrian crisis, al-Watan newspaper reported on Tuesday.

"Some countries' refusal to engage with Iran on efforts to settle Syria's crisis on the pretext that Iran is part of the problem is a clear political mistake," it quoted Shara as saying.

A Saudi man was executed Tuesday after being convicted of murdering a compatriot, the interior ministry said.

Mohammed al-Salala Asiri was beheaded by the sword in the southwestern province of Asir after being found guilty of stabbing to death Amir al-Zayadi, the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.

Israeli aircraft attacked three Hamas training camps in the Gaza Strip early Tuesday, causing no injuries, eyewitnesses in the enclave said.

An Israeli helicopter fired six missiles at two different sites northwest of Gaza city, both training camps for Hamas' military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, eyewitnesses said.

An Israeli court on Tuesday rejected all claims of negligence in a civil lawsuit brought by the family of U.S. activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer during a protest in 2003.

"I reached the conclusion that there was no negligence on the part of the bulldozer driver," said Judge Oded Gershon, reading out his verdict at Haifa District Court in northern Israel.

Switzerland has proposed that former U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte join the U.N. commission investigating rights abuses in conflict-torn Syria, the government said on Tuesday.

Del Ponte has been advocating that a one-year investigative panel set up by the U.N. Human Rights Council last year to probe rights violations in Syria be extended, a spokesman for the federal department of foreign affairs said in a television interview.

Iraq has executed 21 people convicted of terror-related charges, including three women, on the same day, a spokesman said on Tuesday, bringing to 91 the number of people executed so far this year.

The executions come despite a call from the U.N.'s human rights chief for a moratorium on the use of the death penalty in Iraq, amid concerns over the lack of transparency in court proceedings.

Dubai police confiscated a Gulf car with a tampered license plate, said Director of Naif Police Station, Lt. Col. Abdullah Khadem Suroor Al Masam.

He warned that as part of a campaign launched by Brig. Khalil Ibrahim Al Mansouri, Director of General Department of Criminal Investigation, any vehicle would be impounded and the owner would be held accountable if number plates are tampered.

Syria's army pounded the eastern belt of Damascus before dawn on Tuesday after opening a new front east of the capital, a watchdog said, adding that 60 people were killed in the province the previous day.

The violence followed a bloody Monday in which 190 people -- 116 civilians, 40 rebels and 34 soldiers -- were killed across Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.