A unilateral Palestinian bid for statehood in September could lead to fresh conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and destabilize the whole region, a senior Israeli politician has warned.

In an interview with Agence France Presse, Shaul Mofaz, who heads the powerful parliamentary Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said he would urge French leaders not to support the bid during a visit to Paris on Monday.

Syrian troops pushed towards the Lebanese border on Sunday as they pressed a deadly crackdown on dissent in central towns, where gunfire rattled overnight, activists said.

The latest violence in the town of Kseir, near the flashpoint city of Homs, forced "hundreds" of people to flee over the border into Lebanon, the activists said.

The President of the United Nations Security Council for the month of July, Peter Wittig, stressed the importance of Lebanon respecting its international commitments.

He told the daily An Nahar in remarks published on Sunday that the government of Prime Minister Najib Miqati should adhere to international agreements.

Syrian tanks on Saturday rolled into a village on the border with Turkey where workers are scrambling to erect a huge tent city for fear of a new exodus of refugees from the crackdown.

As families across Syria mourned 18 protesters gunned down by security forces on Friday, activists said troops backed by tanks rumbled into al-Najia village near Jisr al-Shughur, a town which the army seized on June 12 after repeated protests.

Hizbullah is moving its arsenal from Syria over fears that the anti-Assad demonstrations would lead to regime change, a Western expert closely following up Iranian-Syrian ties told the French daily Le Figaro on Saturday.

The expert confirmed that Western intelligence had monitored the movement of trucks from the Syrian border to eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa valley.

Syrian security forces opened fire on Friday on anti-regime rallies killing at least nine protesters, three of them in the capital Damascus, human rights activists said.

The violence came as thousands of protesters took to the streets across Syria after the weekly Muslim prayers calling for the fall of the autocratic regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Government Commissioner to the Military Tribunal Judge Saqr Saqr on Friday charged seven people with engaging in a deadly gunfight in the northern port city of Tripoli a week earlier.

Saqr Saqr charged the seven suspects with forming armed gangs, exchanging gunfire with unlicensed arms, and killing a soldier and several civilians.

Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. has dubbed Lebanon as a country that has opened its borders for smuggled weapons, warning that the Jewish state would not withdraw from the border village of Ghajar as long as Hizbullah continues to arm itself.

Ambassador Ron Prosor said following a Security Council session on the situation in the Middle East on Thursday that “Lebanon would be best defined as the open border for smuggled ammunition and arms.”

The European Union on Thursday announced fresh sanctions against President Bashar al-Assad's regime, adding 11 individuals and businesses to a list of Syrians already targeted.

"The Council today adopted a decision ... imposing restrictive measures on seven additional persons and introducing such measures against four entities associated with the Syrian regime, in view of the gravity of the situation," said a statement from the office of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

The Syrian Ambassador to Lebanon Ali Abdul Karim Ali stated on Thursday that Syria wishes Lebanon well, hoping that its new government would be successful in its work because that would benefit Syria.

On March 14 camp claims that the new government belongs to Syria and Hizbullah, he said: “The statements of President Michel Suleiman, Prime Minister Najib Miqati, Speaker Nabih Berri, and all our brothers in Lebanon are a response to such allegations.”