Some 13,000 members of Syria's Palestinian refugee community have gone back to square one in Lebanon. Like their ancestors, they too have been forced to flee their birthplace into exile.

"The Palestinians can endure anything. But the children cannot understand that I cannot bring them milk or change their nappies, that I have no choice but to let them live in misery," said Umm Khalil, cradling one of her children.

Residents of Aleppo have suffered through months of brutal urban warfare and now face a humanitarian crisis with a lack of food and fuel as the Syrian winter sets in.

From throngs outside bakeries hoping for increasingly expensive bread to boys tying ropes around trees to pull them down and chop them up for firewood, the city that was once Syria's commercial hub is now barely surviving amid appeals for more international support.

Syrian rebels attacked a base protecting a military industrial compound in the country's north on Friday as anti-government forces pushed forward in efforts to capture wider areas near the border with Turkey, an activist group said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said seven rebels were killed in the attack on the air defense base in the town of al-Safira.

The Syrian regime has fired Scud-type missiles against rebel forces in what NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Friday said was an act of desperation.

"I can confirm that we have detected the launch of Scud-type missiles; we strongly regret that act," Rasmussen said, adding: "I consider it an act of a desperate regime approaching collapse."

Syria's main opposition group denounced on Friday an Iranian peace initiative for the war-torn country as a last-ditch bid to save the regime of President Bashar Assad.

"As the free forces of the Syrian people accomplish one decisive political and military victory after another, the regime and its allies keep on launching lackluster and overdue political initiatives," said the National Coalition.

The U.N. Security Council on Thursday slapped sanctions on two Iranian firms accused of supplying arms to the Syrian government, a U.N. statement said.

Yas Air and the SAD Import Export Company were added to a growing Iran sanctions list for breaching an arms embargo ordered against the Islamic republic for its nuclear drive.

The U.N. General Assembly on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to rebuke Syria, Iran and North Korea for human rights abuses.

With Syria's conflict worsening by the day, a resolution condemning the Syrian government and its allied militias came as a diplomatic blow for President Bashar Assad.

One of Syria's top three Druze religious leaders Sheikh Hussein al-Jarbua, who had close ties to the regime of President Bashar Assad, has died of cancer, state news agency SANA said on Thursday.

PSP leader Walid Jumblat commented on al-Jarbua's death to Agence France Presse, saying that he “will not shed even one tear for a man who supported till the end a regime that massacres its people and whose son Nazih has given out weapons to the shabiha (pro-regime militia),"

Loyalty to the Resistance bloc MP Nawwaf al-Moussawi slammed on Thursday claims by defected Syrian cleric Abdul Jalil Saeed that Syria was planning on assassinating Mufti of Tripoli and the North Sheikh Malek al-Shaar.

He said: “The claims are lies and baseless.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday denied propping up Syrian President Bashar Assad and stressed that Moscow was only seeking to avert a perpetual civil war.

"We are not concerned about (Bashar Assad's fate. We understand that the family has been in power for 40 years and there is a need for change," Putin told a major Moscow press briefing.