British Foreign Minister William Hague called Monday for "ever-increasing" international pressure, rather than military intervention, to end the violent repression in Syria.

"I don't think the answer to (the repression) now or subsequently would be a military intervention from outside," Hague told reporters in Strasbourg after a meeting of Council of Europe ministers.

Syria has sent the Arab League a letter asking for support against what it called U.S. involvement in "bloody events" in the country, the 22-member pan-Arab group said in a statement on Monday.

The statement said the letter from Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem accused Washington "of actual involvement in bloody events in Syria" and asked the League to "condemn the involvement and to do what is necessary to end it."

Twelve Jewish settlers, seven of them minors, were arrested on Monday when Israeli police dismantled three structures in a settlement outpost near Ramallah, an Israeli police spokeswoman said.

The arrests occurred early on Monday as police and troops demolished three structures set up illegally in the unauthorized settlement outpost of Oz Zion east of Ramallah, spokeswoman Luba Samri told Agence France Presse.

Three Palestinians were wounded by Israeli gunfire east of Gaza City on Monday, a Gaza medical official and the Israeli military said.

"Three Palestinians were wounded by Israel fire in the Shejaiyah district east of Gaza City," emergency services spokesman Adham Abu Selmiya told Agence France Presse, saying one was moderately hurt and the other two sustained light injuries.

Syrian troops entered Monday the Homs neighborhood of Baba Amro and "started demolishing shops," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Residents there saw a truck "filled with corpses," it added.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the United States and Israel of seeking world support for a military strike on Iran, in comments published Monday in which he also warned against attacks on his country.

Ahmadinejad, in an interview with Egypt's state-owned Al-Akhbar newspaper, lashed out at Israel after its president, Shimon Peres, warned at the weekend that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely.

Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ahmed Khatami warned the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Monday not to become "an instrument without will in the hands of the United States" against Iran.

The hardline cleric hit out at IAEA director general Yukiya Amano in an address during communal prayers in Tehran marking the Muslim Eid al-Adha feast.

The Kuwaiti defense minister has denied reports about plans to bolster U.S. troops in the Gulf emirate after their withdrawal from Iraq by year's end, local media reported on Monday.

"Not at all. We have (no plan) to relocate U.S. troops to Kuwait or increase their numbers," Sheikh Jaber Mubarak Al-Sabah was cited as saying by al-Watan newspaper.

Syria's opposition called for "international protection for civilians" in the central city of Homs, besieged by the forces of President Bashar Assad and theatre of deadly clashes between soldiers and alleged army deserters.

Declaring Homs a "humanitarian disaster area," the Syrian National Council urged the United Nations, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League to act "to stop the massacre committed by the regime."

The Iranian government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon after receiving assistance from foreign scientists, The Washington Post reported late Sunday.

Citing unnamed Western diplomats and nuclear experts familiar with new intelligence to be released to the United Nations, the newspaper said a former Soviet weapons scientist had allegedly tutored Iranians on building high-precision detonators of the kind used to trigger a nuclear chain reaction.