A year after the Palestinians went to the United Nations with a historic bid for state membership, president Mahmud Abbas is going back with a trimmed down request for recognition.

With the quest for full membership stalled, Abbas will instead ask the General Assembly to elevate the Palestinians from observer status to that of a U.N. non-member state.

U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi told the U.N. Security Council on Monday that the Syrian civil war is worsening and the country faces a growing food crisis, envoys said.

Brahimi told the 15-nation council that the Syrian government estimates there are 5,000 foreign fighters in the country and is increasingly portraying the conflict as a "foreign conspiracy," envoys at the closed meeting told AFP.

The U.S. State Department has accused CNN of "distasteful" reporting after it used the contents of a private diary kept by slain U.S. ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens without the consent of his family.

Senior State Department aide Philippe Reines told reporters in a statement over the weekend that the television network engaged in "atrocious behavior" in making use of the late envoy's diary as it reported on events leading up to his death at the hands of militants who stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi earlier this month.

Israel must do more to halt a string of serious violations of Palestinian human rights documented by a 2009 fact-finding mission, according to a U.N. report published Monday.

There is a "need to more earnestly pursue accountability for the serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law that were documented by the fact-finding mission," Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kyung-wha Kang told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

A Libyan military official said on Monday that the commanders of the two largest militia brigades in the eastern city of Benghazi have now been replaced by army officers.

"Army chief Yussef al-Mangush issued an order appointing Colonel Amrajaa al-Msheiti as commander of the February 17 Brigade, replacing Fawzi Bukatef," said the senior army officer on condition of anonymity.

A Jerusalem court on Monday handed former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert a $19,000 fine and a suspended jail sentence for graft, meaning he will serve no jail time, court officials said.

The Jerusalem District Court sentenced the former premier to a one year jail sentence suspended for three years, and fined him 75,300 shekels ($19,200), court documents released to media said.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak believes Israel should evacuate dozens of isolated Jewish settlements in the West Bank while annexing larger blocs that are home to most of the settler population.

In excerpts of an interview in Yisrael Hayom published Monday, Barak said he was mulling a plan which would see Israel relinquish dozens of settlements while allowing residents of big blocs -- Gush Etzion, Maale Adumim and Ariel, where up to 90 percent of the settlers live -- to become part of Israel.

Four Iraqi primary school pupils were killed and two wounded on Monday when a booby-trapped car targeting security forces exploded, security and medical officials said.

The vehicle had been parked near the school in the town of Hit, 160 kilometers west of Baghdad.

Syrian warplanes targeted several residential districts of the northern city of Aleppo on Monday, killing at least five people including three children from one family, a rights watchdog said.

The five were killed and others were wounded in the central district of Maadi in the country's second city and commercial hub, a focal point for the fighting since mid-July, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

More than 2,000 Syrian soldiers have defected to Jordan since the conflict erupted last year in the neighboring country, the commander of Jordan's border guards said in remarks published on Monday.

"The number of refugees who have entered Jordan through unofficial border crossings until Wednesday has reached more than 74,000 Syrians... 2053 of them soldiers from various ranks," Brigadier General Hussein al-Ziyud told the semi-official al-Dustour newspaper.