Syrian activists voiced growing fears on Friday of a major assault like the one that devastated the Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr, on the eve of a first visit by new international envoy Kofi Annan.

Troop reinforcements backed by tanks were massing in the northwestern province of Idlib, close to the Turkish border, in a bid to root out rebel fighters of the Free Syrian Army, activists and a human rights watchdog said.

China said Friday it is sending an envoy to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and France to explain its position on Syria, after Beijing called for an end to the year-long conflict in the Middle East country.

China unveiled a six-point peace plan last Sunday, calling for an immediate end to the bloody violence and for dialogue between the regime of President Bashar Assad and the opposition.

A women's conference organized by the dominant Islamist bloc in the Egyptian parliament has called for a council for families to replace the existing National Council for Women, a state-owned daily reported on Friday.

The conference, held Thursday on International Women's Day, also condemned the 1978 U.N. convention against gender discrimination saying it was "incompatible with the values of Islamic sharia" law, the al-Ahram newspaper reported.

Russia said Friday it opposed an "unbalanced" U.S.-backed U.N. draft resolution on the Syria crisis because it did not contain a call for a simultaneous halt in violence by the government and rebels.

"We cannot agree with the draft resolution in the form it is being presented in today. The text of the resolution under discussion is unbalanced," Interfax quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov as saying.

Pakistan has charged Osama bin Laden's three widows with illegal entry, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Thursday, without saying when it had done so or when a trial would begin.

Pakistan took the al-Qaida chief's wives -- two Saudis and a Yemeni -- and around 10 of their children into custody after U.S. Navy SEALs killed him at his house in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad on May 2, 2011.

Tribesmen and politicians in Libya's oil-rich east have polarized public opinion, raised fears that the country might break apart and prompted some of his sharpest statements yet from the interim leader.

Analysts say the problem lies not with the federalism they are proposing but with the unilateral way in which a political movement in the second city of Benghazi is seeking to carve out an autonomous territory in the oil-rich region.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul indicated Thursday that France will be invited to the next meeting of the "Friends of Syria" to be held in Istanbul despite a slump in ties over a genocide bill.

A distinction must be made between bilateral relations and an international conference," Gul said on a visit to Tunisia, after a Turkish diplomat said Ankara had not decided whether to invite France to the conference.

A relief aid coordination meeting on strife-torn Syria opened Thursday in Geneva, with representatives from U.N. agencies, aid groups such as the Red Cross, and member states in attendance.

The closed-door conference chaired by the John Ging, coordination chief of U.N.'s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, would look at current needs and the possibilities of accessing the country, a spokesman said.

Syrian security forces on Thursday killed 62 people across the country, monitors said, as the army sent further troop reinforcements to the northwestern province of Idlib, where activists said they fear an assault similar to the one that devastated the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs.

Fifty-two people were killed in the central province of Homs, including 44 who were summarily executed, two in Idlib province, two in the Damascus suburb of Daraya, three in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, one in the central province of Hama, one in the southern province of Daraa and one in the northern province of Aleppo, the LCC reported.

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired a mortar into southern Israel Thursday morning which exploded without causing casualties or damage, a police spokesman said.

"A mortar was fired in the general direction of a kibbutz, it didn't cause injuries or damage," Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.