NATO is not planning or even "thinking" of intervening in Syria, the alliance's most senior officer said Thursday, days after a top Russian official said such plans were in the making.

"There is no planning and we are not thinking about an intervention," General Knud Bartels, head of NATO's Military Committee, told a news conference after a two-day meeting of the alliance's military chiefs.

Syrian state news agency SANA on Thursday quoted President Bashar al-Assad as rejecting any foreign intervention.

"The Syrian people are attached to their unity and Arab identity despite all the difficulties, and understand the breadth of the plots against their security and cohesion," he was quoted as telling a group of people opposed to outside intervention.

Top U.S. military chief General Martin Dempsey arrives in Israel late on Thursday evening for talks with Israel's political and military leaders that are expected to focus on Iran's nuclear program.

Dempsey's trip will be his first to Israel since becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October.

The deputy head of Libya's National Transitional Council was manhandled by protesters on Thursday in the cradle of the uprising that ousted Moammar Gadhafi last year, witnesses said.

Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, who also serves as official spokesman for the interim government, had to be escorted away after being mobbed by angry students at the University of Ghar Younis in Libya's second-largest city Benghazi, the NTC's wartime base.

Australia urged Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down on Thursday and said he should be tried before the International Criminal Court for "atrocities" against his people.

"Our view in Australia is that Assad must go," Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd told reporters at the French foreign ministry in Paris, at a joint appearance with his counterpart Alain Juppe.

Alawite intellectuals denounced on Thursday what they said are efforts by the Syrian government and parts of the opposition to link their sect to the regime, warning against the consequences of casting a popular uprising for civil rights in a sectarian light.

The group, which includes writers and journalists, denounced the "government's efforts to link the Alawite community and religious minorities to the regime by manipulating the security situation and the media."

Israeli Special Forces detained two Palestinians early on Thursday morning near the southern Gaza city of Rafah, a security official told Agence France Presse.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Israeli forces "crept into the Rafah area and took two citizens to an unknown destination and there is no information on what happened to them."

Syrian security forces on Thursday killed at least 24 people across the country, including four leading pro-democracy activists, as dissident soldiers killed a general in the flashpoint central city of Hama, activists and a rights group said.

“The number of martyrs has risen to 24,” the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist network spurring protests on the ground, said on its Facebook page.

Iran's Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi on Thursday denied Tehran had ever tried to close the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping route at the center of increasing international tension.

"Iran has never in its history tried to prevent, to put any obstacles in the way of this important maritime route," he said in an interview with NTV television during a visit to Turkey.

Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal met the Swiss Middle East envoy in Cairo late on Wednesday as part of efforts to normalize relations with European governments, sources in the Islamist movement told Agence France Presse.

A Hamas official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Meshaal and Jean-Daniel Ruch, whose country is not part of the European Union, discussed the possibility of relations between Europe and the Islamist group which rules Gaza.