Russia will not attend a Friends of Syria meeting in Paris on Friday which seeks to coordinate Western and Arab efforts to stop the violence in the country, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.

"Russia was invited. They made it known that they did not want to participate, which is not a surprise," he told reporters.

Italy on Tuesday dispatched a field hospital to Jordan to help treats tens of thousands of Syrian refugees who have fled violence in their country.

The hospital will be set up in the northern city of Mafraq near the border "to provide health care to displaced persons in Jordan from Syria and to local communities that host them," an Italian embassy statement said.

Russia on Tuesday accused the West of seeking to "distort" the agreement reached last weekend in Geneva on a plan for a political transition to end the escalating conflict in Syria.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov hailed the accord based on proposals by envoy Kofi Annan as an "important step" but said that Western capitals had already read more into the final statement than what was written on paper.

Syrian troops pounded several rebel-held districts in the central city of Homs on Tuesday, as the death toll mounted across the country, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

In total, 38 people were killed on Tuesday, bringing to more than 110 the death toll over two days, the Britain-based watchdog reported.

The "shift" in the positions of Russia and China on Syria should not be underestimated, the spokesman for peace envoy Kofi Annan said on Tuesday after international talks in Geneva.

Israel's interior ministry has approved the construction of a military academy on land in the Mount of Olives in Arab east Jerusalem, Israeli activists and officials told Agence France Presse on Tuesday.

The plan is likely to spark controversy and has already been dubbed a "provocation."

The United States has moved new forces into the Gulf to keep strategic waterways open and strike deep within Iran in the event of a regional military escalation, the New York Times reported Tuesday.

The Times cited senior officials as saying the quiet build-up was aimed at reassuring Israel that Washington is serious about addressing Iran's nuclear program and keeping the Straits of Hormuz -- a key oil choke point -- open.

The Syrian Revolution General Commission (SRGC) has pulled out of an opposition conference in Cairo, citing political "disputes," a statement said on Tuesday.

The two-day conference opened on Monday in the Egyptian capital, under the auspices of the Arab League, to forge a common vision for a transition in the country after a blueprint was adopted by world powers on the weekend.

A truck bomb blamed on Al-Qaida killed 25 people at a crowded market in central Iraq on Tuesday while attacks elsewhere claimed 11 lives, the latest victims of a spike in nationwide unrest.

The violence, the bloodiest of which was in predominantly Shiite areas, came ahead of commemoration ceremonies on Friday for the birth of a key figure in Shiite Islam, and left nearly 100 people wounded in the worst unrest to hit Iraq in three weeks.

Syrian President Bashar Assad regretted that his country's defense forces shot down a Turkish fighter jet on June 22, he said in an interview with the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet published Tuesday.

"The plane was flying in an air corridor used three times in the past by the Israeli airforce," he said, but added that he regretted the incident -- which has further fuelled tensions between the two former allies -- "100 percent.”