Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that the international community must ensure Syria is stripped of its chemical weapons as a lesson to its ally Iran.

Any impression of Syria getting away with its use of such arms would be taken as encouragement by Iran, which Israel and the West accuse of seeking to develop a nuclear arsenal, he said.

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Wednesday Iran is monitoring developments involving ally Syria after a Russian initiative for Damascus to give up its chemical weapons led to postponement of U.S. strike plans.

"If this recent approach is serious, it will translate to a return from the headstrong and wrong approach" the United States had adopted by threatening to attack Syria, Khamenei said in remarks on state television.

Syria has signed major contracts with its main regional ally Iran to provide the war-torn country with food and medical supplies, state media reported on Tuesday.

The regime of President Bashar Assad is suffering an unprecedented financial crisis as a result of a 30-month conflict that has killed more than 110,000 people.

Iranian President Hasan Rowhani added a second woman to his cabinet Tuesday, appointing reformist Masoumeh Ebtekar as vice president to lead the environmental protection organisation, media reported.

Ebtekar, an ex-member of Tehran's city council, already headed the organisation during the presidency of reformist Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2005.

President Hasan Rowhani Tuesday appointed decorated admiral and ex-defense minister Ali Shamkhani to replace hardline Saeed Jalili as secretary of the key Supreme National Security Council, media reported.

The SNSC is responsible for dictating defense and security policies under guidelines set out by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and for marshaling the country's resources to confront domestic and foreign threats.

An Iranian opposition group said Tuesday that it feared seven Iranian exiles arrested in a camp in Iraq where 52 people died in recent violence were on the verge of being extradited to their country.

The Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (CNRI) claimed Iraqi soldiers launched the September 1 attack at Camp Ashraf, north of Baghdad, but Iraqi officials said the violence was the result of infighting.

Senior Israeli politicians have voiced skepticism about Russia's proposal for Syria to surrender its chemical weapons to international control.

Avigdor Lieberman, who chairs the parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, told Israel Radio on Tuesday that Syria could use the proposal to "buy time."

A collision between two buses in Iran killed 44 people and injured 39 others, the ISNA news agency reported on Tuesday, in the country's most serious road accident in years.

The accident took place late on Monday along the highway between Qom and Tehran.

Iran "favorably welcomes" a Russian plan to head off threatened U.S. strikes on Syria by securing a deal to destroy the regime's chemical weapons, the foreign ministry spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Marzieh Afgham told a media conference in Tehran that the proposal should include the destruction of chemical weapons in the hands of rebel groups fighting to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

U.S. President Barack Obama has said that it was possible for Iran and Hizbullah to launch "asymmetrical strikes" in response to U.S. military action against the Syrian regime but dismissed them as nothing more than "the kinds of threats that we are dealing with around the world."

In interviews with six television stations on Monday, Obama said he would not take a recent threat by Syrian President Bashar Assad as credible.