Syrian President Bashar Assad said he is focused on "political reform" and on tackling "armed groups," the official SANA news agency reported on Sunday.

"Syria is taking steps focused on two main fronts -- political reform and the dismantling of armed groups," who seek to destabilize the country, Assad told the visiting foreign ministers of Cuba and Venezuela.

Jewish settlers clashed with Palestinian farmers on Sunday as they tried to pick olives from land owned by the family of two men convicted of killing a young settler family in March.

At least three Palestinians were injured when dozens of settlers armed with sticks and stones attacked the group of about 50 workers as they tried to harvest the olives from land which belongs to the Awwad family from the nearby village of Awarta, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

Israeli police deployed reinforcements around Muslim and Christian sites in Jaffa on Sunday after graves in the mixed port town were found to be desecrated, a police spokeswoman said.

"Police reinforcements have been deployed around the Muslim and Christian religious sites which are considered to be sensitive," spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

Syria will retaliate against any country that recognizes the opposition National Council, Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said on Sunday.

"We will take significant measures against any country that recognizes this illegitimate council," Muallem told a news conference, as the newly formed opposition group lobbied for support in Cairo.

Forces of Libya's new regime on Sunday tightened their stranglehold on Moammar Gadhafi's hometown Sirte, seizing its university and edging closer to his diehards holed up in a conference center.

Fighting has been raging around Sirte's university and the nearby Ouagadougou conference center since the National Transitional Council forces launched on Friday what they are calling their final assault on the coastal city.

Turkey has condemned the "loathsome assassination" of top Kurdish activist Meshaal Tamo as well as attacks against leading opposition figures in Syria, the foreign ministry said.

"We... strongly condemn the attempts aiming to suppress the Syrian opposition and the increase in attacks targeting main representatives of the opposition," the Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement posted on its web site late on Saturday.

A group of about 30 demonstrators stormed the Syrian embassy in Berlin overnight Sunday and confronted the ambassador to Germany, police said, following similar protests in other European capitals.

No one was injured, a police spokesman told Agence France Presse.

Syria closed one of its border gates with Turkey and barred Turkish citizens from entering Syria following bloody clashes in the city of Qamishli, Anatolia news agency reported on Saturday.

Turks were not allowed to cross into Syria from the border gate in Nusaybin city in southeast Turkey, which is only a few kilometers (miles) away from Qamishli, the local governor Murat Girgin told Anatolia.

Vandals defaced graves in two cemeteries, one Muslim and the other Christian, with anti-Arab graffiti in Jaffa south of Tel Aviv, Israeli police said on Saturday.

The vandals wrote "Death to Arabs" and "Price Tag" on 22 graves in the Muslim cemetery and on four in the Christian burial ground, media reports said.

The foreign ministers of Venezuela and Cuba are leading a delegation of leftist Latin American countries to Syria to meet Sunday with Syria's President Bashar Assad in a show of support.

The eight-member ALBA bloc's talks aim to "reject invasion and political destabilization attempts of the country by the United States and its allies," Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said in state news agency AVN.