Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat rejected on Tuesday attempts to shove the eastern border town of Arsal in a direct confrontation with the Lebanese army, which aims at creating incitement and destabilizing the country.

The Druze leader called on the Lebanese to support the army and to consolidate its patriotic role.

State Commissioner to the Military Court Judge Saqr Saqr received on Tuesday the investigation file in the case of former Minister Michel Samaha.

He will study the file ahead of making his assessment.

Fierce battles erupted Tuesday in the city of Aleppo, a northern Syria battleground for the past six months, as rebels fought troops near an army barracks and tanks shelled the area, a watchdog said.

In the countryside surrounding Aleppo, once Syria's thriving commercial capital but now ravaged by war, troops also shelled the rebel-held towns of al-Bab and Sfeira, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Syrian opposition chief Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib's offer of talks with regime officials is significant but "two years late", the pro-regime daily al-Watan said on Tuesday.

"Despite their importance, the statements of Sheikh Moaz al-Khatib are two years late. During that time, our finest young men have died, suffered wounds or been exiled, while we have lost our electricity and fuel infrastructure, alongside several military positions," al-Watan said in a long editorial.

The bishop of the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo on Monday urged the international community to pay greater attention to the fate of Syria's Christian minority, saying they were being terrorized by a spate of kidnappings for money.

"Aleppo has been living in terror and anguish for seven months," Antoine Audo of the Chaldean Church, who also heads the Syrian branch of the Catholic charity Caritas, said in an interview with Agence France Presse.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Monday that Tehran would continue talks with the Syrian opposition following a preliminary meeting at the weekend.

"We had 45 (minutes) to an hour discussion which was very fruitful... and we committed ourselves to continue this discussion," Salehi told a foreign-policy think tank in Berlin after meeting Syrian opposition leader Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib at a security conference in the southern German city of Munich.

Syria's opposition chief urged President Bashar Assad on Monday to respond positively to a call for dialogue and to delegate his deputy to end 22 months of warfare that has cost tens of thousands of lives.

"The ball is now in the regime's court. They will either say yes or no," Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib told pan-Arab channel al-Jazeera, following up on his surprise announcement last week that he was ready for talks with the Damascus regime -- subject to conditions, including the release of 160,000 detainees.

Saudi Arabia slammed an Israeli air strike that hit targets near Damascus as a "flagrant violation" against the war-torn country's territory, the kingdom's official SPA news agency reported Monday.

The Saudi cabinet "condemns the Israeli aggression against Syrian territories which it considers a flagrant violation against the territories of an Arab state and against its sovereignty," SPA reported.

Syrian warplanes launched a deadly raid Monday on the outskirts of the rebel-held town of Douma northeast of Damascus, killing seven civilians, among them six children, a monitoring group said.

"Seven civilians, among them six children, were killed in an air raid on the Shifuniyeh area near Douma," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat praised on Monday Syrian National Coalition chief Moaz al-Khatib's “bold” proposal to hold dialogue with the Syrian regime.

He said in his weekly editorial to the PSP-affiliated al-Anbaa website: “He may have an impossible mission on his hands, but no other alternatives to end the Syrian crisis, based on the Geneva agreement, are available.”