A U.N. convoy attempting to pick up 21 Filipino peacekeepers that their Syrian rebel captors had agreed to free was forced back by a barrage of army shelling on Friday, a watchdog said.

In New York the United Nations said efforts to secure the peacekeepers would resume on Saturday.

Internal Security Forces chief Ashraf Rifi honored on Friday the informer in the case of former Minister Michel Samaha.

He described Milad Kfouri as a “citizen who demonstrated special patriotism because he uncovered a dangerous plot” against the country.

A Syrian official working in the office of the governor of Damascus was killed on Friday by a bomb planted in his car, an official television channel reported, blaming the attack on "terrorists".

"Terrorists planted an explosive device in Asaad Mohanna's car," said al-Ikhbariya television, using the regime's term to refer to rebels fighting President Bashar Assad's forces.

The Croatian capital has served for months as a transit point for Saudi-financed weapons for Syrian rebels, a local newspaper said on Friday, but the report was swiftly denied by the government.

Some 75 civilian transport planes carrying weapons for the rebels battling the regime of President Bashar Assad took off from Zagreb airport between last November and February, the influential Jutarnji List reported citing unnamed diplomatic sources.

EU foreign ministers will hold talks Monday with the international mediator on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, days after the bloc renewed wide-ranging sanctions against President Bashar Assad's regime.

Brahimi will have "an exchange of views" on the two-year conflict in Syria with the 27 EU foreign ministers at their regular monthly meeting, a European Union official said Friday.

U.N. efforts to secure the release of 21 peacekeepers abducted in the Golan dragged on into a third day Friday as Manila said rebels holding the Filipinos were sticking to their demand Syrian troops leave the area.

U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous was to brief the Security Council on the abduction later Friday as concern mounted about its implications for the future of the four-decade-old U.N. force patrolling the sensitive armistice line between Israel and Syria.

A top Syrian regime official thanked the BRICS group of emerging powers on Friday for its support, which she said had prevented Western military intervention and the "destruction" of the country.

Bouthaina Shaaban, a cabinet-level adviser to Syrian President Bashar Assad, told reporters in New Delhi that Damascus was grateful to the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The World Food Program aims to feed 2.5 million Syrians next month, up from 1.7 million today, as more Syrians are displaced by their country's civil war and the economy is disintegrating, a spokeswoman said Friday.

Since the start of the Syria conflict two years ago, nearly 4 million of Syria's 22 million people have been driven from their homes by the fighting, according to U.N. estimates. This includes those who fled to neighboring countries and some 2 million who sought shelter inside Syria.

Israel helped eight U.N. peacekeepers redeploy from an isolated post in the part of the Golan ceasefire zone where 21 of their comrades are being held hostage by Syrian rebels, the military said on Friday.

The troops -- all Filipinos, like the hostages -- left their positions overnight and moved through Israeli-held territory to join up with comrades in the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force further north along the armistice line, an army spokeswoman said.

Dissident Syrian ex-premier Riad Hijab issued a new call on Friday for the arming of rebels fighting President Bashar Assad's rule after Western governments again opposed sending more than non-lethal aid.

Hijab, whose shock flight to Jordan with his family last August was the highest-profile defection from the Assad regime, said foreign arms shipments were the sole way to tilt the balance in the two-year-old conflict.