Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo on Saturday were to warn Syria they will no longer remain silent on its deadly crackdown on dissent, an Arab diplomat said.

The meeting, being held in the absence of Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, was to move first to re-admit Libya in the presence of the rebel government's Prime Minister Mahmud Jibril, who was in Cairo.

China has said it will vote in favor of Palestinian statehood when the matter is presented to the U.N. Security Council next month, the official Palestinian news agency said on Friday.

A message to that effect from Chinese President Hu Jintao was delivered to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Thursday, WAFA said.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday pledged support for a "new Libya," urging triumphant rebels to turn the page on Moammar Gadhafi's rule and build a secure, democratic state.

She also called on the rebels to guard weapons stockpiles and take a hard line against "extremism," as the United Nations began releasing $1.5 billion in Libyan assets earmarked for U.N. programs, food and basic services.

United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) spokesman Neeraj Singh doesn’t expect any change in the force’s mission, denying that there will be any downsizing in their numbers.

“There are no indications that the French contingent numbers will be reduced,” Singh told As Safir newspaper on Monday.

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.

Israelis and Palestinians woke up to a fourth day of violence on Sunday, with militants firing 17 rockets into Israel despite an unusually quiet night in Gaza just hours after a rocket killed an Israeli.

Tensions in and around the Gaza Strip have soared since Thursday when militants staged a series of bloody shooting attacks in the Negev desert, killing eight Israelis and prompting a wave of bloody tit-for-tat exchanges.

Syria's President Bashar Assad told U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday that military operations against protest towns have "stopped," a U.N. spokesman said, amid new reports of killings and mass arrests.

Ban spoke to Assad by telephone ahead of a U.N. Security Council meeting on Syria when, diplomats said, the U.N. human rights chief is expected to call for the international war crimes court to investigate Assad's deadly crackdown.

Russia and Iran pinned their hopes Wednesday on a new Kremlin-backed nuclear proposal aimed at reviving stalled negotiations with Western powers suspicious of Tehran's weapons drive.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met his Iranian counterpart Ali Akbar Salehi to iron out the details of a "step-by-step" plan proposed by Moscow that rewards Tehran for greater transparency with a gradual easing of U.N. sanctions.

The United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations on Tuesday attacked Israel's move to expand a West Bank settlement as a threat to peace efforts.

The new public condemnation of Israel came amid intense efforts by Tony Blair, the diplomatic Quartet's special envoy, to get the Palestinians and Israelis back into direct talks, diplomats reported.

Syrian refugees are fleeing the crackdown in their towns into villages in northern Lebanon before sunset and returning at dawn to escape the raids launched overnight on their homes, the pan-Arab daily Asharq Awsat reported on Tuesday.

Sources told the newspaper that “more than 100 families are emigrating at sunset every day and temporarily from al-Qusayr, Heit, Bouiet and al-Soummaqiyat to the towns of Akroum, al-Nousoub, Houlwas, el-Kneisse and Wadi Khaled.”