Activists said Saturday that at least 24 Syrian civilians have been killed as security forces fired on anti-government protesters as part of a nationwide crackdown.

Syria-based rights activist Mustafa Osso said most of the deaths occurred in Damascus suburbs during daytime Friday protests and late night demonstrations following evening Ramadan prayers.

U.S. officials and their counterparts in Bahrain, which crushed month-long protests in mid-March, have renewed a defense pact, officials said Friday.

The two countries inked a 10-year defense agreement on October 28, 1991, seven months after the Gulf War, that was renewed in October 2001 for the same duration.

Security forces shot dead a gunman as he opened fire on the Jeddah palace of Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz early on Saturday, said a source close to the government.

Another man was arrested during the attack in which "two men opened fire after midnight on the Qasr Shateh residence of Prince Nayef (and) the security forces retaliated, killing one of them," the source told Agence France Presse.

The U.S., French and German leaders pledged to consider new steps to punish Syria after security forces shot dead at least 24 people as tens of thousands staged anti-regime protests on the first Friday of Ramadan.

President Barack Obama spoke separately to France's Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel as Western nations cranked up pressure on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.

Ousted president Hosni Mubarak, convicted for having cut Internet services during the revolt which toppled him, has pinned part of the blame on his successor as Egypt's ruler, a defense lawyer said on Friday.

A Cairo court on May 28 fined Mubarak and two former ministers a total of $90 million dollars for "damaging the economy" with a telephone and Internet shutdown during Egypt's uprising.

An explosion struck an oil pipeline in Iran's oil-rich southwestern province of Khuzestan early Friday, triggering a blaze that took firefighters hours to put out, news agencies reported.

Abdohossein Rezaeizadeh, spokesman for the provinces' branch of the Iranian national oil company, told the official IRNA news agency that the causes of the blast and the subsequent fire were under investigation.

Israel's air force carried out three new raids on the Gaza Strip overnight, wounding three people, Palestinian witnesses and medics said on Friday.

Two adults and a child were hurt when a training camp of the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, the military branch of Hamas that controls the tiny Palestinian coastal enclave, was hit in the north, the sources said.

Turkey said Friday the Syrian regime's deadly crackdown on civilian protestors is "unacceptable" and "illegitimate", Anatolia news agency reported.

"The developments in Syria as I emphasized before are unacceptable," Anatolia quoted Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu as saying.

Prominent Syrian liberal poet and writer Adonis urged Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down, but called on the opposition to adopt a strict secular ideology, in comments published Friday.

"President Assad should do something. If I were in his place, I would leave the presidency," Adonis said in an interview with Kuwait's al-Rai newspaper.

The Gulf state of Kuwait on Friday urged a halt in Syria's deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protesters and called for dialogue and "true reforms" to end the crisis.

"The state of Kuwait expresses its extreme pain for the continued bloodshed among the brotherly Syrian people," said a statement by a foreign ministry official cited by state news agency KUNA.