The international community cannot afford to watch the "massacre" taking place in Syria without acting, Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Thursday during a visit to Washington.

Davutoglu is urging an international conference to resolve violence that erupted when demonstrators began demanding last spring Syrian President Bashar Assad be removed from office.

Russia must confront "the reality" of the deadly crackdown in Syria, EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton said Thursday, after Moscow vetoed a U.N. resolution condemning the violence.

"My message to my Russian colleagues is they too need to recognize the reality of the situation on the ground" in Syria, said Ashton, who was making a two-day visit to Mexico.

Prime Minister Najib Miqati reiterated that cabinet sessions will remain suspended unless he receives promises from ministers that they will be productive, demanding those who don’t want to abide by the government’s decisions to resign.

“I have set a basic rule: you either implement the cabinet’s decisions or if you don’t want to abide by them resign,” Miqati told the pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat on Friday.

France is aware of the pressure exerted on Premier Najib Miqati which he is courageously confronting, Lebanese diplomatic sources in Paris said on Friday.

In remarks to pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat on the occasion of Miqati’s official visit to Paris, the sources said that France shares with the PM his concerns on the repercussions of the Syrian crisis on Lebanon.

The major powers gave a cautious welcome on Thursday to proposals to send a joint Arab League-United Nations mission to monitor Syria's deadly crackdown on protests.

France said there had to be "guarantees" for the mission. The U.S. and German ambassadors to the United Nations said their countries were studying the idea raised by U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday.

The Syrian city of Homs, dubbed "the capital of the revolution," has been under siege by regime forces and suffered the heaviest losses in the country's 11-month uprising.

With Damascus the political capital and the northern city of Aleppo the main commercial hub, Homs with its 1.6 million residents in central Syria represents the country's industrial lifeline.

Two Syrian nationals were badly wounded on Thursday by a landmine at the illegal border-crossing of al-Buni in northern Lebanon, reported the National News Agency.

Ahmed Mustapha Khodr and Ahmad Abdul Karim were injured while attempting to cross the border into Wadi Khaled from the Syrian town of al-Mushayrfeh.

Security forces killed 126 people in Syria on Thursday, 107 of them in Homs in the latest government blitz on the besieged city, said Local Coordination Committees.

Six people were killed in Maarat al-Naaman in Idlib, ten others in Reef Damascus, two in Ain al-Arab Koubani in Aleppo, and one in Latakia.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on Thursday Germany was expelling four diplomats from the Syrian embassy in Berlin after the arrest of two men suspected of spying on regime opponents.

"After the arrest of two people suspected of spying for Syria, I have decided to expel four members of the Syrian embassy in Berlin," Westerwelle said in a statement.

China said Thursday it held talks with a key Syrian opposition group this week, amid fierce criticism of its decision to block a U.N. resolution condemning a bloody crackdown in the Middle East country.

China and Russia drew international ire for blocking the U.N. Security Council resolution on Saturday, with Washington calling their rejection a "travesty" and another Syrian opposition group saying they had handed President Bashar Assad's regime a "license to kill.”