China offered $16 million in humanitarian assistance Thursday for Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan as part of Beijing's growing engagement with the Arab world.

The assistance will go to displaced Syrians sheltering in neighboring countries, including Jordan and Lebanon, President Xi Jinping was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.

World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim said on Wednesday international support for Jordan and Lebanon to help them cope with hosting more than 1.6 million Syrian refugees was "disappointing."

"So far the support for Jordan and also Lebanon... has been frankly disappointing. We need donor countries and all who care about peace and stability in this region to step up...," Kim told a joint news conference in Amman with Jordan's planning minister Ibrahim Seif.

World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim was in Beirut on Tuesday for talks with Lebanese officials on the country's economic situation and mainly a proposal to fund an electricity project, which was welcomed by Prime Minister Tammam Salam.

Al-Liwaa newspaper quoted sources as saying that Salam reacted positively to the funding that is expected to have low interests.

A 69-year-old man has died in Jordan after being infected with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus, a health ministry official said on Sunday.

"The man, who suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure, died in hospital on Wednesday," Sultan Kasrawi of the ministry's communicable disease department, told AFP.

The head of the World Bank Jim Yong Kim is scheduled to arrive in Lebanon on Monday on a two-day visit aimed at discussing the case of Syrian refugees in the country, reported the daily An Nahar on Saturday.

Kim had expressed his dismay with the international community's support for Lebanon in helping it contain the burden of the refugees, noting that the country and Jordan are bearing the brunt of the displaced, said the daily.

A Jordanian military tribunal handed jail terms of between four and 20 years on Wednesday to 11 people it convicted of plotting to attack the U.S. embassy for Al-Qaida in 2012.

The state security court found the men guilty of "plotting to carry out terrorist acts and possessing explosives as well as automatic and other weapons for illicit use."

In what some are calling a complex game of "papal propaganda poker," Pope Francis's prayer at Israel's West Bank separation barrier handed a decisive victory to the Palestinians, commentators said.

"One image from the pope's visit has already become history," admitted Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, saying the picture of the pope's impromptu stop to rest his hand and forehead on the wall "immediately became a Palestinian PR achievement."

Jordan on Tuesday downplayed the expulsion of Syria's ambassador to Amman, Bahjat Suleiman, saying relations with Damascus will not be severed and its embassy will remain open.

"The government's decision to consider Bahjat Suleiman persona non grata and ask him to leave within 24 hours over his insults to Jordan does not at all mean that Jordanian-Syrian ties will be severed," Information Minister Mohammad Momani told government-owned Al-Rai daily.

Pope Francis celebrated mass at a contested Jerusalem site on Monday at the end of a whirlwind pilgrimage which he marked by making a personal bid for Middle East peace.

The 77-year-old pontiff, who has made interfaith dialogue a cornerstone of his papacy, made an impassioned call for an end to religious intolerance, and insisted that believers must have free access to sites they consider sacred within the Holy City.

Syria is to expel Jordan's charge d'affaires, in a tit-for-tat move hours after Amman gave the Syrian ambassador 24 hours to leave the kingdom, state-run television said Monday.

"The Syrian foreign ministry will order the expulsion of the Jordanian charge d'affaires to Damascus, after the Jordanian foreign ministry declared the Syrian ambassador to Amman persona non grata," said Al-Ikhbariya television.