Britain, France and the United States will quickly draw up a U.N. Security Council resolution proposing sanctions against Syria over the worsening conflict, diplomats said Friday.

Vandals overnight slashed car tires and sprayed graffiti at a mixed Arab-Jewish community west of Jerusalem in an attack which bore the hallmarks of an act of settler revenge.

An Agence France Presse journalist said cars in the village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam or Oasis of Peace were sprayed with slogans including "Death to the Arabs" and "Revenge" in Hebrew.

Former U.N. chief Kofi Annan, the author of a fledgling peace plan on Syria, called Friday for "additional pressure" in the wake of a new massacre as he held talks in the United States.

Opening a meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.N.-Arab League envoy said he would discuss "how we can put additional pressure on the government and the parties to get the plan implemented."

United Nations observers on Friday reached the Syrian village of Al-Kubeir where dozens of residents were massacred two days ago, activists told Agance France Press.

The monitors on Thursday were fired at by gunmen and forced to turn back as they tried to reach the village located in a farming region in the central province of Hama.

Shootings and bombings in Iraq on Friday killed four people, including a parliamentary official and a senior emergency officer, officials said.

In Baghdad, civil defense Colonel Mohammed Yunis was killed and his wife and two children were wounded when gunmen opened fire on the family's car just outside the capital's heavily-fortified Green Zone, home to parliament and the U.S. embassy, an interior ministry official and a medical source said.

France backs U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan's bid to bring key powers into a contact group on the Syria crisis, but it opposes bringing Iran into the group, the foreign ministry said Friday.

"We are favorable to any initiative that can help put into operation the Annan plan," foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero told reporters.

Russia said Friday after talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Syria envoy that it was unaware of any plans by President Bashar al-Assad to leave power.

Senior Russian diplomats said they also told special envoy Fred Hof that Moscow was willing to agree changes to international envoy Kofi Annan's peace plan for Syria as long as they kept the tattered initiative alive.

Germany said Friday it was "horrified" by the latest Syrian massacre and urged Russia to throw its support behind a tougher condemnation of Damascus by the United Nations Security Council.

Government spokesman Steffen Seibert said at a regular briefing that Syrian President Bashar Assad had lost all "legitimacy" and that a political solution was "unthinkable.”

China on Friday condemned the latest civilian killings in Syria, but refused to back a call by U.N.-Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan to increase the pressure on the regime of President Bashar Assad.

Annan told the U.N. Security Council Thursday he feared the crisis would "spiral out of control" unless there is more international pressure on Assad.

Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Friday insisted that claims his supporters were involved in fighting in Syria were false, but said members of "splinter" groups could be involved in the violence.

"All these claims are lies," Sadr, a powerful Shiite cleric, said in a written response to a question from one of his followers over allegations that Sadrists are taking part in the violent suppression of the ongoing uprising against the Syrian regime.