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."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday accused the United States of supplying weapons to Syria's rebels, worsening the conflict engulfing Moscow's allied regime in Damascus.

Russia was supplying "anti-air defense systems" to Damascus in a deal that "in no way violates international laws," Lavrov told a news conference during a brief visit to Iran.

Israel's state watchdog on Wednesday sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his handling of a 2010 military raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla which left nine Turkish nationals dead.

"In the process of decision making, which was led by the prime minister and under his responsibility, regarding the handling of the (flotilla), there were significant shortcomings," said a report published by State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss.

A military court in Tunisia sentenced ousted president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali to 20 years imprisonment in absentia Wednesday on various charges including incitement to murder, the TAP news agency reported.

Ben Ali, who is exiled in Saudi Arabia, was found guilty of "inciting disorder, murder and looting," the court said in its verdict over the deaths of four youths, shot dead in the town of Ouardanine in mid-January 2011.