The international Red Cross said it delivered relief supplies on Sunday to refugees from the battered Baba Amr district of Homs city in a nearby village of central Syria.

"We have started to distribute humanitarian aid in Abel village, three kilometers (two miles) from Baba Amr," International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) spokesman Saleh Dabbakeh told AFP.

Israel will take any decisions on Iran's nuclear activities as an "independent state," Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday, on the eve of a U.S.-Israel summit in Washington.

"Clearly, the United States is the biggest world power and the biggest and most important country that is a friend of Israel, but we are an independent state," Lieberman told Israeli public radio.

Iran is stepping up its military and intelligence support for Syrian government troops in their crackdown against opposition strongholds, The Washington Post reported late Saturday.

Citing three unnamed U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports from the region, the newspaper said Tehran had increased supplies of arms and other aid for Syrian leader Bashar Assad as he is trying crush resistance in the key city of Homs.

The bodies of American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik, killed in the bombardment of a rebel flashpoint in Syria last week, were flown into Paris from Damascus Sunday.

Relatives of Ochlik, who was 28, were there to meet his coffin as the regular Air France flight, via Amman, touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport in the French capital, an airport source said.

China on Sunday called on the Syrian government and other "parties concerned" to cease all acts of violence and seek a peaceful resolution to the crisis, Xinhua reported, citing the Chinese foreign ministry.

The state news agency said the ministry had released a statement, attributed to an unnamed official, calling for dialogue between the regime and those expressing "political aspirations".

The United Arab Emirates on Saturday defended a decision to expel Syrians who staged a protest against the Damascus regime, saying they had broken a pledge to abide by the country's laws.

"Like any nation the UAE expects all residents to abide by its laws," an unidentified foreign ministry official said in a statement obtained by Agence France Presse.

177 Syrians were killed on Saturday, mostly civilians, including 6 defected soldiers in clashes between the regime army and the Free Syrian Army across the country.

Head of the Free Syrian Army told al-Jazeera that “the Free Syrian Army killed more than 100 regime troops in Reef Damascus.”

Libyan Islamists and independents have formed a new political party and elected a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood on Saturday as its leader after a three-day conference, an Agence France Presse reporter said.

Mohammed Sawan, an ex-political prisoner under the regime of dead dictator Moammar Gadhafi who outlawed the formation of political parties as an act of treason, was elected Justice and Construction party leader by 51 percent of those present.

The United States remains committed to strong ties with Egypt, a U.S. official said Saturday, after tensions over the treatment of U.S. activists who had been barred from leaving Cairo.

"We have all been focused over these past few weeks on the NGO issue, and it is a matter of serious continuing concern for the United States," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a statement.

Iraq will take further measures to secure its border with Syria in an effort to prevent weapons smuggling and trafficking, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office said on Saturday.

The statement, which offered no specifics, is the second announcement in two weeks that Iraq will tighten the roughly 600-kilometer frontier with Syria, amid a nearly 12-month bloody crackdown by Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime on an anti-government revolt.