Lebanese lawyers representing Syrian refugees in northern Lebanon filed a lawsuit to the first chief prosecutor of the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Moreno-Ocampo against Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Kuwaiti al-Anba newspaper reported on Thursday.

The refugees accused Assad, who is the supreme commander of the Syrian Army and armed forces, and his accomplices of committing “murders, war crimes, genocides and crimes against humanity” in Syria since the March 2010 uprising against the regime.

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Wednesday on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to send tanks back into barracks to prove that it is fully implementing an international peace plan.

"Unless tanks go back into barracks, we cannot say the six-point peace plan is being implemented," Erdogan said at a press conference televised by private NTV news channel.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of tougher measures if he squanders his "last chance" by failing to implement a U.N.-Arab peace plan.

During a visit to Brussels, Clinton appeared increasingly concerned over whether a fragile six-day truce will hold and offered Assad a stark choice over whether he pursues peace or resumes crushing a pro-democracy movement.

Ten vehicles belonging to the team of U.N. observers overseeing Syria’s shaky ceasefire arrived at the Beirut Rafik Hariri International Airport on Wednesday.

“Over the past hours, a private Italian jet landed at the Beirut Rafik Hariri International Airport carrying a Land Cruiser SUV. It was followed by three other planes coming from the Czech Republic and carrying nine vehicles belonging to the U.N. observers in Syria,” Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported.

A ceasefire to end 13 months of bloodshed in Syria was violated again on Wednesday with 39 people reported dead, despite the government’s latest bid to reassure the United Nations over its willingness to implement the peace plan.

Regime forces killed 20 people in Homs, three in Idlib, four in Daraa, two in Aleppo, two in Hama and one in rural Damascus, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.

France said Wednesday that 14 foreign ministers would attend a meeting on Syria in Paris on Thursday to send a "strong" message to Bashar al-Assad's regime to implement a peace plan.

"The obstacles to the U.N. observers' mission that Damascus is putting in place and the Syrian regime's continued repression, contrary to its commitments, calls for a strong reaction from the international community," French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said in a statement.

Turkey has intercepted a Bermuda-flagged vessel suspected of carrying weapons and ammunition to Syria in the Mediterranean, a diplomatic source told Agence France Presse on Wednesday.

"We received information that the vessel has a cargo of arms and ammunition headed for Syria," the source said on condition of anonymity, adding that Turkish authorities would search the vessel later in the day.

March 8 camp MPs took turns on Wednesday in defending the government on the second day of the session aimed at assessing its work.

Development and Liberation bloc MP Ghazi Zoaiter defended the government’s decision to distance itself from regional affairs, saying that such a position guarantees Lebanon’s neutrality and its equidistance from all sides.

Russia on Wednesday accused the armed opposition in Syria of trying to provoke violence that could involve foreign powers and said it saw nothing standing in the way of dialogue.

"There are plenty of those who would like to see (Kofi) Annan's plan fail in hopes of then demanding other options -- primarily meaning the use of (outside) force," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters.

Growth in the Middle East and North Africa took a dive in 2011 because of the Arab Spring protests and resulting political upheaval, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the region, stretching from Iran to Mauritania, grew by 3.5 percent last year, down from a healthy 4.9 percent in 2010, the IMF said in its World Economic Outlook.