The number of people inside Syria in need of emergency humanitarian aid is expected to rise to more than four million early next year, while refugee numbers will soar to 700,000, the head of the U.N.'s humanitarian efforts said Friday.

"In the early new year... we're predicting that the numbers of people in need will exceed four million, up from 2.5 million," John Ging, who heads the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told reporters in Geneva.

The jailed son of Iran's former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani denies reports that he has been charged with spying, the Mehr news agency quoted his lawyer as saying on Friday.

"Unfortunately a news agency and two news sites reported some allegations against Mehdi (Hashemi)," lawyer Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabee said.

Syria's largest armed opposition group is undergoing a drastic reorganization and relocating its leadership to rebel-held territory in a bid to win vital international support, a general told Agence France Presse.

Mustafa Sheikh heads the military council that presides over the Free Syrian Army (FSA) but which has been criticized for failing to bring order to a chaotic, umbrella group, some of whose members are implicated in suspected war crimes.

Veteran dissident George Sabra, a Christian former communist, was elected president of the Syrian National Council opposition bloc at a meeting in Doha on Friday.

The SNC's 41-member general secretariat, itself newly elected, chose Sabra, who garnered 28 votes, as part of efforts to revamp the group working to oust President Bashar Assad.

At least 114 people were killed in violence across Syria on Friday as thousands of anti-regime protesters took to the streets, monitors said.

The Local Coordination Committees, a network of activists on the ground, said regime forces killed at least 90 people in several regions.

Several hundred Salafists demonstrated in Cairo on Friday to demand that sharia, or Islamic law, be the basis for legislation in a new constitution being drafted for Egypt.

Nearly 2,000 radical Islamists gathered in Tahrir Square for the second consecutive Friday to vent their demands, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak blamed Hamas on Friday for the detonation of an explosives tunnel along the Gaza border which wounded a soldier, and said he was mulling how and when to respond.

The blast, which was claimed by the armed wing of the ruling Islamist Hamas movement, took place several hours after a Palestinian teenager was shot dead by troops in the same area, just east of the southern city of Khan Yunis, Palestinian medical officials and witnesses said.

Israel's deputy prime minister Moshe Yaalon warned Damascus on Friday it would act to defend its sovereignty if the bloody fighting in Syria continued to spill over into the occupied Golan Heights.

His remarks, published on his official Twitter account, were made a day after three stray mortar rounds fired from Syria hit the occupied Golan, which Israel seized in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in 1981 in a move never recognized by the international community.

Some 8,000 Syrian refugees fled to Turkey overnight in the face of escalating clashes between rebel forces and troops loyal to Damascus near the border, a foreign ministry official told Agence France Presse on Friday.

The latest influx brought the total number of Syrian refugees in Turkey to more than 120,000, the official added on condition of anonymity.

Syrian President Bashar Assad said his future could only be decided through the ballot box, in an interview with Russian television where he warned the country could face a protracted war.

Assad told state-run Russia Today (RT) that whether the president can "stay or leave" is a "popular issue" and "the only way (it) can be done (is) through the ballot boxes.”