Three million Syrians need food, crops and livestock assistance, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization said Thursday, citing a survey by the United Nations and the Syrian government.

The FAO said that figure included 1.5 million Syrians who "need urgent and immediate food assistance over the next three to six months, especially in areas that have seen the greatest conflict and population displacement."

The Israeli Defense Ministry estimated that if the country engaged in a war with Hizbullah and Iran some 200 Israeli civilians would die.

According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the number of fatalities could rise to 300 if Syria joins the war as well.

Rebels in Syria on Thursday bombarded the Menagh air base that was being used by helicopter gunships and other warplanes to attack the northern city of Aleppo, sources said.

Syrian rebels used tanks to attack a military airport northwest of Aleppo on Thursday, a rebel commander said, as a human rights group reported 67 people killed in violence nationwide.

"We had already attacked the airport several times, but this was the first time we used heavy weapons," which were "four tanks taken from Anadan," rebel commander Abdel Aziz Salameh told Agence France Presse, referring to a strategic military checkpoint outside Aleppo that the rebels captured on Monday.

Syrian shells hit at dawn Thursday an area in the northern district of Akkar that lies six kilometers away from the Lebanese-Syrian border, injuring two people, the National News Agency reported.

NNA said this was the first time that shells hit an area relatively far from Lebanon’s northern border.

President Barack Obama has signed a covert document authorizing U.S. support for Syrian rebels locked in a battle to overthrow beleaguered President Bashar Assad, reports said Wednesday.

The directive was contained in a "finding" -- a device authorizing clandestine action by the Central Intelligence Agency, NBC and CNN said, citing unidentified sources.

Lebanon deported 14 Syrians on Wednesday despite the raging violence over the border, drawing criticism from human rights activists.

The Lebanese authorities said the reasons for the expulsions were not political but a Human Rights Watch representative in Beirut said some of the deportees had expressed fears of persecution on their return.

The United States Wednesday denounced Syrian President Bashar Assad as "cowardly" and "despicable" for calling on his forces to continue the fight against opposition rebels.

"We think it's cowardly quite frankly to have a man who's hiding out of sight be exhorting his armed forces to continue to slaughter the civilians of his own country," said a U.S. State Department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell.

France will seek to organize a ministerial-level U.N. Security Council meeting on Syria before the end of August, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in a statement on Wednesday.

France currently holds the rotating chair of the Security Council and Fabius had said on Monday that Paris would try to organize a meeting before the end of this week.

President Vladimir Putin will strongly defend Russia's position on the Syria conflict when he meets British Prime Minister David Cameron in London on Thursday, his spokesman said.

"We expect to have another opportunity to continue our dialogue and explain to the British side our well-argued, consistent and absolutely clear position on the (Syria) problem," spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies.