As Syria's conflict spirals to vicious new depths, Iran is doubling down on its support for Damascus out of fear of losing its main pillar of regional influence, analysts said.

The backing reflects Tehran and Damascus's shared anti-West, anti-Israel position and mutual succor as each weathers international sanctions and attempts to isolate them.

Egypt's justice minister on Wednesday granted the army the right to arrest civilians, after such powers expired with the lifting of the decades-old state of emergency last month.

Adel Abdel Hamid issued a decision granting army personnel -- including military intelligence and military police -- the right to detain civilians.

France plans to ask the United Nations Security Council to make U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan's Syria ceasefire plan mandatory, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Wednesday, as British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that Syria was "on the edge of a collapse."

Fabius called on fellow Security Council members to "take recourse to Chapter Seven (of the U.N. charter) to make the measures in the Annan plan obligatory."

Noble Energy began on Wednesday to deliver natural gas from a new field off southern Israel in a bid to avoid electricity shortages due to a cut in Egyptian supplies, the company said.

"Noble Energy and its partners are making good on their promise to do everything possible to bring as much gas as possible to the Israeli market in the absence of gas delivery from Egypt," it said in a statement.

The leader of Tunisia's ruling Islamist party on Wednesday dismissed suggestions that recent unrest was the result of a call to rise up by Al-Qieda supremo Ayman al-Zawahiri.

"Ayman al-Zawahiri has no influence in Tunisia. This man is a disaster for Islam and for Muslims," Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi told reporters.

An electrical fault caused a shopping mall blaze last month that killed 19 people, most of them children, at an unlicensed Doha nursery, state news agency QNA quoted investigators on Wednesday as saying.

The fire began in a sporting goods store in Villagio Mall, next to the Gympanzee nursery, where 13 children died.

Tunisia's top authorities Wednesday condemned both "extremist groups that threaten freedoms" and "attacks on religion" after rioting blamed on hardline Islamists over an art exhibition.

A joint statement by the heads of the state, the constituent assembly and the government followed the most serious unrest since the Arab Spring, in which one person was killed and around 100 injured, and 165 arrested.

Around 2,500 Syrians have fled to Turkey in the last 48 hours, a Turkish foreign ministry official said Wednesday, saying the numbers had increased amid fresh attacks even targeting U.N. observers.

The number of Syrian refugees in camps set up in southeastern Turkey had reached 29,500, said the official who wished to remain anonymous. Some 1,500 Syrians had arrived in the last 24 hours, he noted.

France on Wednesday called for a complete halt to arms sales to Syria amid growing Western criticism of Russian weapons exports to President Bashar Assad's regime.

"We are calling for a complete halt to arms exports to the Syrian regime asked by joint United Nations-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan before the Security Council last week," French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said.

Syria has not entered into a civil war, the regime and an opposition group said on Wednesday in response to the U.N. peacekeeping chief's statement to the contrary.

"This announcement makes the killer and the victim equal and ignores all the massacres committed by the Assad regime," the Syrian Revolution General Commission said, adding that people in the country "are only asking for freedom and dignity."