Syria's opposition will never defeat President Bashar Assad's army even if it is "armed to the teeth," Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

"It is clear as day that even if the Syrian opposition is armed to the teeth, it will not be able to defeat the government's army," Interfax quoted Lavrov as saying while on a visit to the ex-Soviet nation of Azerbaijan.

Israeli forces on Wednesday began evicting a group of settlers from a disputed house in the West Bank city of Hebron, a day after they were ordered to leave the property, police said.

"The security forces are evacuating the house at this moment," said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.

A car bomb apparently targeting a local police chief killed five people and wounded 10 in central Iraq on Wednesday morning, police and medical officials said.

"Five people were killed and ten wounded by a car bomb" that exploded near the town of Dhuluiyah, 70 kilometers north of Baghdad, a senior police officer in nearby Samarra said.

Iran wants crucial nuclear talks with world powers to take place in Baghdad instead of Istanbul as had been mooted, according to a statement from Iraq welcoming the proposal.

An "Iranian delegation expressed the desire for Iraq to host the international meeting on the Iranian nuclear file of the five permanent members of the (U.N.) Security Council plus Germany" in Baghdad, said the statement posted on the foreign ministry's website late Tuesday.

U.S. President Barack Obama called Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Tuesday to congratulate him on the Arab summit held last week and to stress his support for a unified Iraq.

In a statement announcing the call, the White House termed last week's Arab summit, Iraq's diplomatic coming-out party following the full withdrawal of U.S. troops late last year, a "success."

The U.N. Security Council will have to take "very urgent and serious" action if Syria fails to meet an April 10 deadline to halt its military operations in protest cities, U.S. ambassador Susan Rice said Tuesday.

U.N. Security Council members negotiated a statement backing the April 10 deadline that U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan says Syria has accepted, as fierce clashes were reported between government forces and rebels.

The United States said Tuesday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was failing to live up to pledges for a truce and warned that it will judge him by "his actions, not by his words."

Fierce clashes were reported again Tuesday in Syria despite Assad's assurances to peace envoy Kofi Annan that he would "immediately" start pulling back forces and complete a military withdrawal from urban areas by April 10.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are to hold renewed talks, in what would be their first public meeting in more than two months, a senior official said on Tuesday.

"There are preparations with the Israeli side to have a meeting between Saeb Erakat and Yitzhak Molcho in the next few hours or days," the senior Palestinian official told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon warned Tuesday that the Middle East peace process was at a "dangerous impasse," and urged Israel to allow Palestinians under administrative detention to contest their imprisonment.

"The Middle East peace process is at a dangerous impasse," he said in a message to a two-day meeting on the legal and political implications of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons.

The International Criminal Court prosecutor said Tuesday he would hold off on a probe into alleged Israeli war crimes in the Palestinian territories until the U.N. rules on Palestinian statehood.

"The office (of the prosecutor) has assessed that it is for the relevant bodies at the U.N. or the Assembly of State Parties to make a legal determination whether Palestine qualifies as a state for the purpose of acceding to the Rome Statute", the court's founding treaty, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.