Bab al-Tabbaneh residents briefly blocked on Tuesday the international highway that links the northern city of Tripoli with Akkar to demand the government to compensate the damages caused by the recent incidents in the city.

Protesters blocked the road with trucks, cars and garbage containers demanding the Higher Relief Council to pay them their compensations, the National News Agency reported.

The March 14 alliance lashed out on Tuesday at Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, pointing out that the high tension level in his speech indicates the crisis his party is going through over the developments in Syria and the opposition’s rejection to attend the all-party talks.

“He divided the Lebanese into two categories: conspirators and patriots,” sources close to the March 14 coalition told al-Joumhouria newspaper.

The parents of U.S. journalist Austin Tice, who has been missing in Syria for three months, said Monday they have not heard from him since he disappeared as they appealed for his release.

Speaking to the media in Beirut, Mark and Debra Tice said they had not been contacted by any party holding the 31-year-old, a contributor to The Washington Post and McClatchy Newspapers, among other publications.

The six Gulf states recognized a newly formed opposition bloc as the Syrian people's legitimate representative on Monday, as border violence stoked fears of a spillover of the country's 20-month conflict.

The Gulf Cooperation Council move came a year to the day after the Arab League suspended Syria's membership, and as the National Coalition met Arab foreign ministers in Cairo buoyed by the hard-won unity deal.

Syria's opposition agreed to unite after marathon talks in Doha, electing a moderate cleric as its leader with a prominent dissident and a female opposition figure named as his deputies.

Here are brief profiles of the three top figures of the newly-formed National Coalition:

NATO is ready to help member state Turkey as the 20-month conflict in Syria is increasingly spilling across the border, the alliance's chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Monday.

"Turkey can rely on NATO solidarity, we have more plans in place to defend and protect Turkey, our ally, if needed," Rasmussen told reporters in Prague, but declined to go into details.

Cardinal Robert Sarah, an envoy sent by the pope to Lebanon in lieu of a Vatican mission to Syria, said that he had witnessed "unprecedented suffering" among refugees fleeing the civil war.

"I arrived at the border with Syria and, unfortunately, I saw unprecedented suffering," Sarah told Sunday's edition of the Holy See's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

Israeli troops fired tank shells into Syria on Monday in retaliation for a mortar round that struck near an army post in the Golan Heights, scoring "direct hits" on the source of the fire, the army said.

"A short while ago, a mortar shell hit an open area in the vicinity of an IDF (army) post in the central Golan Heights, as part of the internal conflict inside Syria, causing no damage or injuries," it said.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies launched an emergency appeal Monday for 32.3 million Swiss francs ($34.1 million, 26.8 million euros) to help up to 170,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey.

"The Turkish Red Crescent Society is extending its existing response to prepare for the onset of winter and to increase its assistance to up to 170,000 displaced people over the coming months," the IFRC said in a statement.

Russia on Monday called on Syria's newly-united opposition to seek a negotiated solution to the conflict with the regime of President Bashar Assad without interference from abroad.

Syria's opposition factions agreed at a conference in Qatar at the weekend to create a new National Coalition led by moderate Muslim cleric Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib that aims to win broad international recognition.