The Syrian army pressed a crackdown on dissent in the northwest on Sunday making sweeping arrests, as troops deployed in the hotbed central city of Hama, an activist said.

Troops backed by 97 tanks and personnel carriers advanced late Saturday on Kfar Rumma village and made arrests in the district of Jabal al-Zawiyah, said Rami Abdel Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Speaker Nabih Berri has said that Beirut was as calm as Norway’s capital Oslo when the Special Tribunal for Lebanon handed General Prosecutor Saeed Mirza a copy of the indictment in ex-Premier Rafik Hariri’s assassination case.

In remarks to An Nahar daily published Sunday, Berri said that Shiites proved their “commitment to the instructions of the political and religious leaderships and were not shocked by the accusations against the four people.”

Syrian forces killed 28 civilians on Friday on a day of massive anti-regime rallies and in shelling of villages in the northwestern province of Idlib, human rights activists said.

State television meanwhile reported that President Bashar Assad sacked the governor of Hama, a day after half a million protesters flooded the central city demanding the ouster of their embattled leader.

Yediot Ahronot Israeli newspaper reported on Saturday that the international investigation committee in the 2005 assassination of ex-Premiere Rafik Hariri will “introduce a new list of accusations against Syrian security officials.”

The reports said that handing the names of the accused to Damascus has been “postponed due to the Syrian unrest.”

Syrian security forces on Friday killed 11 civilians as more than half a million people took to the streets across the country to demand the departure of President Bashar al-Assad, activists said.

Six people died in the central city of Homs when security forces opened fire to quash protests, two were killed in Damascus and one in Daraya, near the capital, activists told Agence France Presse.

Around 150 Syrians fleeing unrest in their hometowns arrived Friday in north Lebanon via an illegal border crossing, a cleric working with the displaced told Agence France Presse.

Sheikh Mustafa Hammoud, imam of a mosque in the border village of Kneissi, said the Syrians -- mainly women, children and the elderly -- had made their way from the village of al-Qussair overnight for fear of fresh unrest after Friday Muslim prayers.

Time is running out for Syrian President Bashar Assad, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday amid reports of anti-regime protests in the country's second city Aleppo.

Clinton, who spoke on a visit to Lithuania, criticized the regime's incoherence in authorizing an opposition meeting and cracking down on political dissent.

Lebanese newspapers on Friday mirrored the deep political rift in the country after a U.N.-backed tribunal issued indictments in the 2005 assassination of former premier Rafik Hariri.

While dailies loyal to former Premier Saad Hariri hailed Thursday's indictment -- expected to implicate Hizbullah members in the case -- as a triumph of justice, those close to the Shiite group slammed it as another Israeli plot.

The U.N. Security Council on Thursday extended the mandate of the U.N. force monitoring the ceasefire in the Golan Heights between Syria and Israel by another six months.

The unanimous decision extends the mandate of the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) to December 31, 2011.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Thursday that he plans to visit Syria, facing mounting criticism for its bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, while on a tour of the region.

Davutoglu said that he hoped at the weekend "to leave for a tour of countries in the Middle East which will include Syria," the Anatolia news agency reported.