Fierce fighting erupted on Wednesday between regime troops and rebels near Damascus and in Homs province, a watchdog said, while reporting 39 more people killed across Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said five people were killed in the Damascus suburb of Douma, a hotbed of anti-regime sentiment, while a civilian was shot dead in Daraya, in the same province.

Japan and Turkey lined up on Wednesday with many of their Western allies who have kicked out Syrian diplomats as international outrage grows over brutal mass slayings blamed on the government in Damascus.

Japan has told the Syrian ambassador in Tokyo to leave the country, the foreign ministry said.

Iran condemned Kuwait on Tuesday for sentencing two Iranians, a Kuwaiti and a stateless man to life in prison for spying for Iran and demanded they be released.

On Monday, Kuwait's appeals court reduced a death sentence on the two Iranians and the Kuwaiti to life and upheld the stateless man's sentence.

French President Francois Hollande said on Tuesday that the use of armed force could be possible in Syria following the Houla massacre, but that it had to be carried out under U.N. auspices.

"An armed intervention is not excluded on the condition that it is carried out with respect to international law, meaning after deliberation by the United Nations Security Council," Hollande said in a television interview.

A top U.N. official said Tuesday there are "strong" suspicions that a militia loyal to Syria's President Bashar Assad carried out a massacre in the town of Houla which has sparked international condemnation.

"There is strong suspicion that the Shabiha were involved in this tragedy in Houla," U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous told reporters at the U.N. headquarters.

Belgium declared the Syrian ambassador and two diplomats "persona non grata" Tuesday to protest the Houla massacre while raising the prospect of "a military presence" that was short of intervention.

Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said however that Syria's ambassador -- Mohammad Ayman Jameel Soussan -- could not be expelled immediately as he was also ambassador to the European Union.

The United States said Tuesday that it hopes the massacre in Syria sparks a "turning point" in Russia's reluctance to take tougher action against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Washington welcomes the fact "that the Russians are willing to have a full investigation (of the massacre) because we think it's undisputable what that investigation is going to show," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

The head of Tunisia's ruling Islamist party, Rached Ghannouchi, said on Tuesday that the Arab Spring provided an opportunity to reconcile Arabic public opinion with the West.

He spoke at the opening of a conference in Doha on relations between the United States and the Muslim world, focused on the challenges created by the popular revolts that have swept the region and changed the political map.

Russia on Tuesday called for an "objective and impartial" U.N.-led probe into last week's massacre in the Syrian city of Houla that killed 108 people and left some 300 wounded.

"At this stage, there should be an objective and impartial investigation conducted under the auspices of the U.N. monitoring mission in Syria," the foreign ministry said in a statement after telephone talks between Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and international peace envoy Kofi Annan.

The long-overdue process of updating electoral lists in Gaza is expected to take six weeks, the head of the Palestinian Central Election Commission said on Tuesday.

The announcement was made a day after Hamas gave the CEC the green light to begin updating the lists for the first time in six years in a key step to paving the way for elections.