Thousands flocked on Wednesday to a hilltop memorial above Yerevan to mark the 98th anniversary of the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I which Armenia wants recognized internationally as a genocide.

In the annual ceremony broadcast by all national television channels, huge crowds headed to the memorial that commemorates the massacres to lay flowers at the eternal flame.

A consortium of Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and France's Areva are on track to win a deal to build a $20 billion nuclear power station in Turkey, a report said on Wednesday.

The top-selling Yomiuri Shimbun said Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo would likely sign the deal with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a visit to Turkey next week as part of a four-nation trip that ends on May 4.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday said he would go ahead with a scheduled trip to the Gaza Strip in May despite U.S. calls to delay the visit.

"There is no question of delaying this trip," Erdogan said on Turkish television.

Turkey expressed its dismay on Monday with the way U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry asked Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to delay a visit to the Gaza Strip planned for next month, saying that an experienced diplomat would not do so.

Kerry's statement "is not correct diplomatically", Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc told reporters. "It is up to our government to decide where our prime minister or a Turkish official will go and when."

Israeli and Turkish officials on Monday began talks on compensation over a deadly Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship, a crucial step towards restoring the once-solid ties between the two countries.

Israel last month finally made a formal apology for the botched 2010 raid in which its troops killed nine Turkish activists on a Gaza-bound flotilla.

The relatives of the abducted Lebanese pilgrims in Syria's Aazaz held a protest on Monday near Turkish airlines offices in al-Azarieh building in downtown Beirut, threatening to stage an open-ended sit-in near the Turkish embassy in Rabieh.

“We will go ahead with our sit-ins near the Turkish airlines offices and we will stage an open-ended sit-in near the Turkish embassy when the weather improves,” Adham Zogheib, the son of one of the kidnapped men, told Voice of Lebanon radio (93.3).

The United States has delivered to the World Food Program enough wheat to feed more than a million Syrians for four months, the U.N. agency said in a statement on Sunday.

The MV Advantage ship offloaded part of the 25,000 tons of wheat in Beirut on Monday and the rest in Turkey's Mersin port on Friday, the WFP said, adding that it will milled and then distributed across Syria as part of its emergency assistance program.

Syria's opposition on Saturday called on international supporters to carry out "surgical strikes" on positions used by President Bashar Assad's regime to fire missiles on civilians.

Voicing frustration at the lack of a strong international response to Syria's crisis, the Syrian National Coalition urged Western and Arab countries gathered for a "Friends of Syria" meeting to take immediate action.

The families of the Lebanese Shiite pilgrims abducted in Syria’s Aazaz staged a sit-in on Monday at the Karantina fish market and prevented Turkish refrigerated trucks from unloading their shipments, in the second such protest against Turkey’s interests in Lebanon.

Adham Zgheib recited a statement in the name of the protesters, confirming that the families will continue their escalatory steps until the release of the abductees and saying they have been “fed up with the false promises given to them over the past 11 months.”

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday announced plans to visit Gaza at the end of May, possibly after a key trip to Washington which brokered a rapprochement between Turkey and Israel last month.

"God willing, we will be in Gaza at the end of May. We will embrace one another there," Erdogan said through a video link with a Turkish aid center in the tiny Palestinian territory, media reported.