A Syrian rebel commander and a group of fighters told an opposition meeting on Wednesday they had decided to abandon the insurgency against President Bashar Assad and return to the regular army.

"We have decided to return to the army and cooperate with the Ministry of National Reconciliation," said Captain Khaled Abdel Rahman al-Zamel, speaking at a conference organized by opposition groups tolerated by Assad's regime.

The leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority both address the United Nations on Thursday, one seeking recognition for his state, the other warning of a dire threat to his.

One year after Mahmud Abbas made his historic appeal to the U.N. General Assembly for Palestinian statehood, he returned with the more modest goal of seeing his territory given a kind of elevated non-member observer status.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron said Wednesday that the blood of children killed in the Syria conflict had become a "terrible stain" on the reputation of the United Nations.

Cameron's comments were the latest in an onslaught by Western leaders pressing Russia and China to lift their veto on U.N. action against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The White House said Wednesday that President Barack Obama did see the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi as terrorism, after Mitt Romney accused him of downplaying the incident.

The Republican presidential candidate, hoping to dent the president's favorable approval ratings on foreign policy, has attacked Obama for describing turmoil in the Middle East as "bumps in the road."

A rocket fired during clashes between Syrian regime forces and rebels exploded on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Wednesday without causing casualties, the military said.

"A rocket fired in the morning during fighting inside Syria exploded on the Golan, without causing casualties or damage," an Israeli military spokeswoman told Agence France Presse.

Egypt's new president on Wednesday hit out at Israel over its veiled threats to attack Iran's nuclear facilities and the deadlock in the Middle East peace process.

President Mohammed Morsi received a rousing ovation for his first speech to the 193-member U.N. General Assembly since becoming Egypt's first civilian, democratically elected leader in June.

Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki on Wednesday said his country would support an Arab peacekeeping force in Syria, as nations struggle to find a solution to the conflict.

"A peacekeeping operation by Arab nations is something we could well imagine," Marzouki told Agence France Presse on the sidelines of a U.N. General Assembly.

Six people were killed and 16 others wounded as a hand grenade exploded by accident in a local market of southern Yemen on Wednesday, a security official and a witness said.

The grenade exploded in Rabat market, in the Lahj province town of Rasd, killing six, including the person carrying it, the official said, requesting anonymity. "The incident did not have any political motivation."

Tunisian civil society groups expressed outrage on Wednesday after a young woman was accused of indecency by two policemen jailed for raping her, amid criticism of the Islamist-led government for rolling back women's rights.

The woman and her fiance were summoned by a magistrate on Wednesday to face the two policemen, both found guilty of rape and jailed, who accuse her of "indecency" and "assault," a group of Tunisian NGOs said in a statement.

More than 30,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in violence since the outbreak of a revolt against President Bashar Assad in March last year, a monitoring group said on Wednesday.

"At least 21,534 civilians, 7,322 soldiers and 1,168 defectors have been killed in the past 18 months," Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.