U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Monday said Washington was ready to help Tunisia develop its capacities to combat al-Qaida, and urged closer regional cooperation in fighting the terror network.

"The U.S. Department of Defense stands ready to help Tunisia to ensuring regional stability, to strengthen the capabilities of its defense institutions," Panetta told reporters after meeting President Moncef Marzouki.

A convoy of unarmed U.N. observers came under attack in Syria, U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon said Monday as he expressed mounting concern at the spiraling onslaught by government forces.

The five-vehicle convoy which was carrying U.N. mission chief General Babacar Gaye came under small arms fire near the protest city of Homs, a U.N. peacekeeping spokeswoman said.

Morocco's King Mohammed VI vowed on Monday to press ahead with reforms, including strengthening the independence of the judiciary and battling corruption, in a speech to mark 13 years on the throne.

"Justice, regionalization and territorial governance are among our top priorities," he said in the speech broadcast live on state television.

Syria's top diplomat in London resigned Monday in protest against the "violent and oppressive" acts of President Bashar Assad's regime, the British Foreign Office said.

The move comes after a series of defections by senior Syrian officials in recent weeks, including diplomats in several countries and top army officers.

The United States has slashed a signature Iraqi police training program as it downsizes its massive diplomatic mission amid high costs and negative Iraqi sentiment, a U.S. watchdog said on Monday.

The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction said in a report on an audit it conducted that the United States had wasted some $206 million on building facilities for the Police Development Program (PDP), which a top Iraqi interior ministry official has termed "useless."

The new head of the U.N. observer mission in Syria said on Monday that he saw heavy shelling in the central city of Homs and major damage to the nearby town of Rastan during his first visit into the field.

"During my visit to Homs, I was personally able to witness heavy shelling from artillery and mortars ongoing in the neighborhoods of the city," Lieutenant General Babacar Gaye told reporters after Sunday's trip.

Israeli prosecutors on Monday charged a Druze resident of the occupied Golan Heights with spying for Syria, the Shin Bet internal security service said in a statement.

It said that Iyad Johari, from the border village of Majdal Shams, was charged with having contact with a foreign agent and passing information to the enemy.

The Vatican's envoy to Damascus on Monday urged religious leaders in Syria to appeal for an end to the violence, warning that the "cancer of conflict" was spreading across the country.

"With the weight of your moral authority, come together and issue in the name of God a unanimous and severe warning to all parties in the conflict to cease violence and repression," Archbishop Mario Zenari said on Vatican radio.

Iran has significantly stepped up the pace at which it is enriching uranium, shortening the time it would take for it to reach a nuclear threshold, two Israeli newspapers reported on Monday.

"Iran has broken new records in terms of the pace at which it has been enriching uranium, and it has continued to race ahead so as to create as short a 'storming distance' as possible between it and the bomb," the Maariv daily said.

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Ahmed bin Abdul Aziz on Monday described prominent Shiite cleric Nimr Nimr, detained in the kingdom's Eastern Province, as mentally ill.

"Nimr Nimr is someone who stirs sedition... The way he speaks reflects a mental deficiency and imbalance," Prince Ahmed said at a press conference, according to a report by state news agency SPA.