Syria's President Bashar Assad told U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday that military operations against protest towns have "stopped," a U.N. spokesman said, amid new reports of killings and mass arrests.

Ban spoke to Assad by telephone ahead of a U.N. Security Council meeting on Syria when, diplomats said, the U.N. human rights chief is expected to call for the international war crimes court to investigate Assad's deadly crackdown.

The Tunisian government has recalled its ambassador in Syria for "consultations", the foreign ministry announced Wednesday.

"Given the dangerous situation in Syria, the Tunisian government has decided to recall its ambassador in Damascus for consultations," the official TAP news agency quoted the ministry as saying.

Five Kuwaiti MPs Wednesday submitted a draft bill demanding that the government suspend all cooperation agreements and loans with Syria over its bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.

Spokesman for the opposition Popular Action bloc, MP Mussallam al-Barrak, said the bill calls for ending all forms of cooperation agreements and memoranda of understanding between Kuwait and Syria.

The United Nations on Wednesday said it had withdrawn about 25 international staff and dozens of families of expatriate workers from Syria because of mounting security fears.

"Due to security concerns, we have taken the decision to relocate about 25 non-essential international staff, plus dependents, from Syria," Farhan Haq, the deputy U.N. spokesman, said in New York.

European countries, the United States and Arab countries will ask the United Nations' top human rights body to hold a special session on the human rights situation in Syria, diplomats told Agence France Presse Wednesday.

"We will submit the request (Wednesday) evening to convene a special session of the Human Rights Council on Monday," according to one European diplomat who wished to remain anonymous.

Switzerland widened sanctions against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime on Wednesday, adding 12 individuals to a list of key players under financial embargo and travel restriction.

"These restrictive measures have been decreed due to the violent repression that the army and the Syrian security forces have enforced for two months to snuff out peaceful demonstrations by the population," the economy ministry said.

A Palestinian pedestrian was killed overnight when an Israeli border police jeep hit him in an east Jerusalem suburb, the man's family and a border police spokesman told Agence France Presse on Wednesday.

The victim, 38-year-old Amin Talab Dabash, was hit by the jeep as it drove through an area near the Jewish settlement neighborhood of Har Homa in annexed east Jerusalem.

Russia is continuing to supply weapons to Syria despite international pressure to cease trading, the head of the arms export agency told journalists on Wednesday.

"While no sanctions are announced, while there are no orders or directions from the government, we are obliged to fulfil our contractual obligations, which we are now doing," Rosoboronexport chief Anatoly Isaikin said.

Military operations in Syria killed at least four civilians on Wednesday in an unrelenting crackdown on dissent as a pro-democracy protest movement entered its sixth month, activists said.

The central committee of the ruling Baath party, which has been in power since 1963, met for the first time since protests against President Bashar al-Assad's regime erupted in mid-March, pro-government daily Al-Watan said.

Syrian diplomats are intimidating expatriates who speak out against the regime, and reporting back home where dissidents' relatives are then threatened and arrested, according to Wednesday's Wall Street Journal.

The Obama administration told the Journal it had "credible" evidence that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is using the reports from its embassies abroad to target relatives of those living overseas, particularly Syrian-Americans who have joined peaceful U.S. protests.