Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi rejected any foreign intervention in Syria on Thursday as he joined European Union talks aimed at ramping up pressure on the regime over its crackdown on dissidents.

"We reject any accusation that the Arab League is inviting any intervention," Arabi said on arrival for a lunch with EU foreign ministers, who slapped a new round of economic sanctions on Damascus.

The March 14 General Secretariat lauded on Wednesday Prime Minister Najib Miqati’s announcement that he had transferred the country’s share of the funding of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

It criticized however the manner in which it was achieved, describing it as being “smuggled.”

Seven more people died in fresh violence across Syria on Tuesday, including a civilian killed by security forces after three of their own were gunned down by suspected mutinous soldiers, activists said.

Syrian troops killed four civilians, including a child, as they hunted for militants and arrested 29 high school students in a raid in the southern province of Daraa, cradle of the anti-regime dissent, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Arab League has offered to review its sanctions on Syria if Damascus agrees to a plan to send observers to the restive country, a league official told Agence France Presse on Monday.

Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi has also indicated that the 22-member organization, which agreed a raft of sanctions on Sunday, would be willing to slightly modify the observers' mission.

The Arab League's unprecedented move to slap sanctions on member state Syria will further damage the economy but without bringing the country to its knees, officials said on Monday.

"It will be a severe impact on the Syrian economy, that's for sure," Economy and Trade Minister Mohammed Nidal al-Shaar acknowledged, although it was difficult to determine the precise effects.

Free Syrian Army chief Riad al-Asaad on Thursday claimed President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was now counting on "mercenaries" sent by Lebanon's Hizbullah and Iraq's anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.

In a telephone interview with Agence France Presse, Asaad also called for foreign air strikes on "strategic targets" in Syria to speed up the fall of the regime.

Jordan's foreign minister has said dozens of Syrian army defectors have "illegally" entered the neighboring kingdom, but his assertions were denied by the government spokesman in comments published on Tuesday.

"Some Syrians, including former members of the armed forces, have entered Jordan illegally ... not through border posts," Nasser Judeh said in an interview with the state-run Jordan Television on Monday night.

Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has reached a "dead end" but only internal forces can bring about change, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said Monday, in an interview with the Guardian.

Speaking on the eve of a three-day state visit to Britain, Gul warned that Assad's back-tracking on reforms agreed by the Arab League had made international negotiation impossible.

European nations on Monday condemned "terrible atrocities" in Syria as they formally launched a new bid to get a U.N. resolution passed condemning the deadly crackdown on opposition protests.

The U.N. General Assembly's human rights committee will vote Tuesday on the resolution which the Damascus government's U.N. envoy said was proof that the European nations suffer from "Syria-phobia".

British Foreign Secretary William Hague urged the Syrian opposition to unify to become stronger as he held his first meeting with their representatives in London on Monday.

Hague said after the talks at the Foreign Office he had reiterated that Britain wanted President Bashar al-Assad and his regime to stand down over its bloody crackdown on opposition protesters.