Iran on Sunday cautioned NATO against any military intervention in its main regional ally Syria, warning the transatlantic alliance that it “would drown in a swamp from which it would never be able to escape.”

“Syria is the spearhead of resistance in the Middle East and the NATO alliance cannot intimidate this country by waging an attack,” Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in an interview with the official IRNA news agency.

Libyan rebels closed in on Moammar Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte from both east and west Sunday, a senior military commander said, as the insurgents scrambled to restore essential services to Tripoli.

Fierce fighting was also raging in the west of the country as rebels trying to take full control of the region said they had fallen into an ambush in a town southwest of Zuwarah.

Iran "discreetly" provided humanitarian aid to Libyan rebels before the fall of Tripoli, Jam-e-Jam newspaper quoted Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi on Sunday as saying.

"We were in touch with many of the rebel groups in Libya before the fall of (Moammar) Gadhafi, and discreetly dispatched three or four food and medical consignments to Benghazi," Salehi told the daily.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said that if Egypt asked to increase its troops in the Sinai peninsula, the request would be brought before the security cabinet, public radio said.

Netanyahu's remarks were made to ministers from his right-wing Likud party before the start of the weekly cabinet meeting -- the first since an attack on August 18 killed eight Israelis on a desert road near the Egyptian border by gunmen who infiltrated from the Sinai.

The brother of the Islamist assassin of former president Anwar Sadat returned to Egypt from exile in Iran on Sunday and surrendered to the authorities, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

Mohammed Shawki al-Islamboulli, who was sentenced to death in absentia for leading the Islamist network Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiyya in the mid-1990s, was whisked away by officials from the military prosecutor's office as he arrived in Cairo.

Syrian security forces on Sunday shot dead two people and wounded nine others in the northwestern province of Idlib, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"Two people were killed and another nine wounded in the Khan Sheikhoun area near Idlib (city) during an incursion by security forces and the army," Observatory head Rami Abdul Rahman told Agence France Presse by telephone.

The homes of fallen Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi's children tell of the siblings' privileged and security-conscious lives but do not display the extravagance of ex-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's sons.

"These are the homes of Gadhafi's sons," said one rebel who gave his name as Marwan, pointing to three seafront houses in the district of Regatta on the outskirts of the capital.

Iran on Sunday sentenced to death a man accused of playing a key role in the 2010 murder of a top nuclear scientist and of spying for Israel, the official IRNA news agency reported.

"The sentence to execute the terrorist Majid Jamali Fashi ... has been issued" for the assassination of scientist Masoud Ali Mohammadi, Iran's prosecutor general Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie said, quoted by IRNA.

Two Syrian officers were among 18 people killed in a twin suicide bombing at a military academy in Algeria, a diplomat said Sunday.

The Algerian Defense Ministry had said 16 officers and two civilians were killed and 26 people wounded in Friday's attack on the Cherchell military academy, west of Algiers.

Syrian President Bashar Assad on Sunday issued a decree on a new media law that would ban journalists being jailed and also give them access to information, the official news agency SANA reported.

Assad "issued the legislative decree of the media law," it said, without elaborating.