A majority of Israel's security cabinet now supports an attack on Iran in a bid to end its nuclear program, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday, citing political sources it did not identify.

Writing in the Maariv daily, influential columnist Ben Caspit said most of the 14-member security cabinet was now leaning in favor of a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, a move which he said was supported by both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

U.S. congressional minority leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday dismissed a row with Egypt over the trial of American democracy activists as a road bump in strong bilateral ties, as she visited Cairo.

The Democrat former speaker led a house delegation that met military ruler Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and parliamentarians, after Egypt defused a crisis with the U.S. by allowing the NGO activists to leave the country.

U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan remains in contact with Syrian authorities, a spokesman for his office said Thursday, on the eve of a scheduled videoconference from Geneva with the Security Council.

Annan was to hold the videoconference with the U.N. in New York as part of a "closed briefing" of the Security Council, spokesman Ahmad Fawzi told Agence France Presse.

The Egyptian foreign ministry said Thursday it was in talks with Tripoli over a request to hand back members of slain leader Moammar Gadhafi’s regime seeking refuge in Egypt.

Libya's prosecutor had written to his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, providing a list of Libyans in Egypt belonging to the former regime who are wanted back home.

Armed Bedouin were besieging an international peacekeepers' camp in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula on Thursday to press for the release of jailed tribesmen, security officials told Agence France Presse.

The Bedouin maintaining the week-long siege have set up stone barricades around the camp in north Sinai and prevented soldiers with the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) from entering or leaving, the officials said.

Hundreds of activists in a "Freedom Convoy" who tried to enter Syria from Turkey were stopped near the border on Thursday, as the uprising against the Damascus regime entered its second year.

Turkish police stopped hundreds of mostly Syrian activists as they approached a border crossing outside the city of Kilis, but they escorted a small delegation of organizers in two cars to the post.

More than 9,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed across Syria since the outbreak of the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad's regime one year ago, human rights monitors said on Thursday.

"A total of 9,113 people have been killed, including 6,645 civilians," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Civil unrest is increasing the risk of hunger for 1.4 million people in Syria, which must raise cereal imports by a third to offset a loss in output, the United Nations' food agency said Thursday.

"Continued civil unrest in the Syrian Arab Republic since mid-March 2011 has raised serious concern over the state of food security, particularly for vulnerable groups," the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) said.

Amnesty International on Thursday called on Egypt to refuse a shipment of weapons from the United States because of the risk they will be used "to commit human rights violations."

The rights watchdog says the Dutch-flagged vessel, MV Schippersgracht, which left the U.S. Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point (MOTSU), is "carrying a class of dangerous goods that covers cartridges for weapons, fuses and other ammunition" and is headed to Egypt's Port Said.

The bodies of 23 torture victims were found on Thursday near the city of Idlib in northwest Syria that security forces captured earlier this week, a monitoring group said.

"Twenty-three bodies with marks of extreme torture were found near Mazraat Wadi Khaled, west of the city of Idlib," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in a statement.