The death toll in a building collapse in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria has reached to 19, the health ministry said on Monday, adding that it was still searching for survivors.

"Nineteen bodies have been retrieved from under the rubble of the collapsed building," the health ministry said.

Shootings and bombings in the north of Iraq killed three members of the security forces on Monday, officials said, while a senior leader of al-Qaida's front group was found dead by police.

In Nineveh province, a roadside bomb killed two off-duty Iraqi soldiers as they were driving an unmarked car in al-Kissik, west of provincial capital Mosul, according to army First Lieutenant Khalaf Zaidan.

Syria's Muslim Brotherhood began Monday a two-day meeting on the outskirts of Istanbul focusing on ways to support the uprising against the regime in Damascus, a member of the organization said.

"It is the first meeting of the organization after more than 30 years," since many of its members fled Syria following a revolt that was violently suppressed in 1982, Omar Mushaweh, representative of the Muslim Brotherhood within the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group, told Agence France Presse.

Dialogue is no longer a solution to ending the slaughter in Syria and the United Nations' Security Council must step in, Jordan's Prime Minister Fayez Tarawneh said in the Czech capital Prague Monday.

"It's impossible to resolve the situation in Syria through a dialogue today," Tarawneh said following talks with Czech counterpart Petr Necas.

Syria declared Morocco's ambassador persona non grata on Monday, the foreign ministry said, in a tit-for-tat move hours after Rabat expelled Damascus's envoy to the North African country.

"Syria has just considered the accredited Moroccan ambassador to Syria persona non grata," ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said via Twitter, after Morocco demanded that Syrian ambassador Nabih Ismail depart the country.

Syria is in a state of all-out civil war and all sides must respect international humanitarian law or risk facing war crimes prosecutions, the Red Cross said on Monday.

The International Committee of the Red Cross had previously regarded only the areas around Idlib, Homs and Hama as zones of non-international armed conflict -- the diplomatic term for civil war.

Russia on Monday accused Western powers of using "blackmail" to get its backing for possible U.N. Security Council sanctions against Syria over the regime's crackdown on an armed opposition.

"To our great regret, we are witnessing elements of blackmail," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a news conference over moves to end 16 months of violence that the opposition says has claimed more than 17,000 lives.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held top-level talks on Monday with Israeli leaders expected to focus on changes sweeping the Middle East, as well as Iran and the stalled peace process.

On the last leg of a 12-day, eight-nation tour, Clinton was also to brief Israeli leaders on a weekend trip to Egypt when she met with newly elected President Mohammed Morsi and military leader Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi.

Fierce fighting engulfed Damascus on Monday, inching closer to the heart of the Syrian capital as troops shelled pockets of resistance in the south, east and west, activists said.

The unprecedented escalation was described as a "turning point" in Syria's 16-month uprising by a Local Coordination Committees (LCC) activist based in the central neighborhood of al-Midan.

A group of Palestinians gathered on Monday to cross from Gaza and visit relatives in Israeli prisons for the first time in five years.

The visits were banned in June 2007, leaving the families of hundreds of Gazans held in Israeli jails unable to see their sons, husbands and fathers.