U.S. President Barack Obama said as momentous scenes unfolded in Tripoli Sunday that Moammar Gadhafi's regime had reached a "tipping point" and the Libyan "tyrant" must leave now to avoid further bloodshed.

In a written statement, Obama also looked to the post-Gadhafi era, calling on Libyan rebels who have surged into Tripoli to respect human rights.

The Arab League on Sunday condemned the Israeli raids on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and called on the international community to put pressure on the Jewish state to halt the strikes.

The pan-Arab organization "calls on the international community to pressure the Israeli occupation authorities to put an immediate end to this assault," a statement from the League said.

Red Cross delegates hope to visit soon thousands of Syrians jailed since the start of pro-democracy protests in mid-March, a spokesman for the ICRC said on Sunday.

"During his visit to Damascus June 21 and 22, ICRC chief Jakob Kellenberger made such a request," Saleh Dabbakeh, spokesman of the International Committee for the Red Cross, told AFP in the Syrian capital.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu warned Saturday that relations with Israel will further deteriorate without an apology over a deadly 2010 flotilla raid.

"There can be no normalization with Israel if Turkey's demands are not met," the Anatolia news agency quoted him as saying during a visit to South Africa.

Hizbullah denied on Saturday that the Time magazine had interviewed one of the suspects named in the indictment issued by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon probing the assassination of ex-Premier Rafiq Hariri.

Hizbullah’s media department issued a statement saying “the Time magazine reporter claimed that he met a high-ranking source from Hizbullah, then found himself introduced to the suspect.”

Opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad were meeting Saturday in Istanbul to launch a "national council" to coordinate the fight against the Damascus regime, organizers said.

Participants in two days of meetings in an Istanbul hotel, from both inside and outside Syria, planned to set up working groups and draft measures aimed at ousting Assad, who was targeted by new international sanctions on Friday.

Tanks rumbled into the central city of Homs at dawn Saturday, a day after security forces killed at least 33 anti-regime protesters across Syria, adding urgency to a U.N. mission expected this weekend.

"Several tanks took up positions at dawn in the district of Al-Khalidiyeh" in the central city of Homs, Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Agence France Presse.

Lebanon, the Arab member of the U.N. Security Council, on Friday blocked a statement which would have called deadly attacks in southern Israel terrorism, diplomats said.

The move brought criticism from the United States which said the terrorism label is a "standard" Security Council description after such an attack.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in Mogadishu Friday for the first visit by a major leader in nearly two decades to witness the devastation wrought by a famine in the Somali capital.

Somalia is the country worst affected in the Horn of Africa by a prolonged drought that has been officially declared a famine by the United Nations in five regions in the country, including Mogadishu itself.

Eight people were killed as a wave of suicide explosions rocked a British cultural center in Kabul Friday, a public holiday marking Afghanistan's independence from Britain in 1919.

Five blasts, claimed by the Taliban, struck the British Council offices in Kabul amid bursts of heavy gunfire that began in the early morning and were ongoing four hours later. A fresh explosion hit the area at 10:00am (05:30 GMT).