The six Gulf states sharpened their tone against their Shiite neighbor Iran on Tuesday, demanding an immediate halt to its "interference" in their internal affairs while urging a rapid political transition in its ally Syria.

Concluding a two-day summit in Manama, the Gulf Cooperation Council members voiced support for Bahrain's Sunni minority regime while lashing out at Tehran, which they accuse of fueling a Shiite-led uprising in the host country last year.

International peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi met Tuesday in Damascus with three opposition groups tolerated by the regime, a day after holding talks with President Bashar Assad, an Agence France Presse correspondent said.

Brahimi, the U.N.-Arab League's special envoy to Syria, arrived in the country on Sunday to launch a fresh bid to end the country's spiraling conflict, which in almost two years has killed more than 44,000 people.

Israel's nationalist religious Jewish Home party is continuing to win support away from the rightwing Likud party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of January 22 elections, according to a poll published Tuesday.

The party led by Naftali Bennett is now projected to win 13 seats in next month's elections, the survey published in the daily Haaretz shows, up two from the newspaper's last poll on December 10.

Syrian insurgents ambushed and killed a military intelligence officer near Damascus while the army pounded several rebel bastions in and around the capital and insurgents seized a town near Turkey, a watchdog reported on Tuesday.

"Rebel fighters ambushed the military intelligence chief in Jaramana on Monday night, after which he was killed," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Israel's interior ministry has approved the building of 1,200 new homes in the east Jerusalem settlement neighborhood of Gilo, the latest in a slew of such approvals, Israeli watchdog Peace Now said.

The approval, which came late on Monday night, follows Israeli committee approvals for thousands of units in neighborhoods across east Jerusalem and in the West Bank last week.

Yemen's army Tuesday launched an offensive against tribesmen suspected of repeatedly sabotaging an oil pipeline in east Yemen, sparking clashes which left 17 people dead, tribal sources said.

The dead included 10 tribesmen and seven soldiers, said the sources, who added that the army offensive in Marib province's Habab valley, 140 kilometers (87 miles) east of the capital Sanaa, was launched in the early hours of the morning and was backed by air raids.

The annual summit of Arab monarchs in the Gulf opened in Manama on Monday with a call for closer economic integration and unity in the face of the turmoil which has swept much of the Middle East.

King Hamad of host country Bahrain called for the Gulf Cooperation Council to provide "a security umbrella for its peoples" and urged "economic complementarity" between its six member states.

Kuwait's appeals court Monday upheld a life term on two police officers convicted of torturing a citizen to death at a police station two years ago.

The court also confirmed jailing three officers for 16 years each, a fourth for 15 years and a fifth for two years and ordered their dismissal from the police force.

Warplanes carried out several strikes on Monday on rebel-held areas in the Eastern Ghouta region near Damascus, where fresh clashes pitting insurgents and troops erupted, said a monitoring group.

The area east of Damascus is home to some of the rebel Free Syrian Army's fiercest and best organized groups. Several towns in Eastern Ghouta have become key flashpoints in Syria's conflict, as the violence draws ever nearer to the capital.

The Lebanese lawyer of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on Monday blasted as "illegal" the auction of the deposed Tunisian dictator's assets and threatened to take the case to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

"The Tunisian authorities have committed an illegal act and we will take this matter to the United Nations Human Rights Council," Akram Azouri told AFP.