Iraq's cabinet on Tuesday decided to provide humanitarian aid to war-torn Syria and launch a relief campaign via the Iraqi Red Crescent, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement.

The cabinet decided "to provide humanitarian aid and begin a popular campaign of humanitarian relief for the brotherly people of Syria, via the Iraqi Red Crescent," Dabbagh said, without providing further details.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday that the Syrian civil war is a "calamity" that now threatens world peace and demands action by the divided U.N. Security Council.

Ban told the opening of the U.N. General Assembly that the Syria conflict "is a regional calamity with global ramifications" that needs action by the Security Council.

The Damascus regime said its forces recaptured a strategic district of Aleppo city, a claim rejected by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which gave an nationwide toll of 85 people killed nationwide on Tuesday.

At least three children were also killed in the country, including a six-year-old killed by soldiers who opened fire on the car she was in on the motorway linking Aleppo to Damascus, the Britain-based watchdog said.

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi will travel to Turkey on Sunday for discussions expected to focus on the conflict in Syria, state media reported.

Morsi's visit will be his first to Turkey since he became Egypt's first democratically elected civilian president in June.

Khaled Meshaal, the head of the Hamas movement, has reaffirmed his decision to relinquish leadership of the group, Hamas officials said on Tuesday.

The movement in January announced its longtime leader-in-exile was ready to step down from his post, but said members were hoping he would reconsider his decision.

A top Islamist lawyer said on Tuesday the nephew of slain Al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was among six jihadists arrested in Jordan last week as they tried to cross into Syria.

"Jordanian border guards on Saturday arrested six mujahedeen, including Abu Asyad, the nephew of Zarqawi, as they attempted to go to Syria for jihad," Musa Abdullat, a leading lawyer for Islamist groups, told AFP.

Powerful explosions shook a military administration building on Tuesday in the Syrian capital Damascus, causing casualties, Syrian Observatory of Human Rights watchdog reported.

"The bombs exploded on Tuesday morning in the headquarters of the administration that manages schools for the children of martyred soldiers," at the start of the Damascus airport road, Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told Agence France Presse.

A Syrian rebel commander, Colonel Kassem Saadeddine, has escaped an assassination attempt by pro-regime forces unscathed, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army (FSA) told Agence France Presse on Tuesday.

"Colonel Saadeddine's convoy was ambushed by shabiha (pro-regime militiamen) after midnight in Salmiyeh in Hama province" in central Syria, Fahd al-Masri told AFP.

Kuwait's constitutional court ruled on Tuesday that the Gulf emirate's electoral constituency law was in line with the constitution, rejecting a government appeal, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

"The recourse is rejected," judge Faisal al-Murshid declared in a court verdict, a day after thousands of opposition supporters rallied against the government's attempt to redefine the constituencies.

Two bomb blasts struck Yemen's gas and oil pipelines that link central fields with maritime terminals on the Gulf of Aden, officials and a company statement said Tuesday.

The first explosion early on Tuesday sabotaged the country's sole pipeline transporting gas from fields in Marib to the southern Belhaf export terminal, Yemen LNG Company said.