Turkey scrambled fighter jets after Syrian helicopters flew close to the border, the army said Sunday, hiking tensions following last month's downing of a Turkish plane.

Four F-16 warplanes took off from Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey after Syrian helicopters flew four miles closer to the border than is normal, the statement said.

Leila Ben Ali, the reviled wife of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, said both the deposed Tunisian dictator and her hoped for "justice" in an interview published by French daily Le Parisien on Sunday.

In the first interview since the couple fled to Saudi Arabia after a popular uprising in January last year that sparked the Arab Spring protests, she also said her husband wanted Tunisians to recognize his achievements.

Iran on Sunday said weekend talks held between major powers seeking a solution to the conflict in Syria were "unsuccessful" because it and Syria were excluded.

"This meeting was unsuccessful... because Syria was not present and some influential nations were not present," Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab-African Affairs Hossein Amir Abdolahian told state television.

Russian technicians were involved in the taking down of the Turkish fighter jet by the Syrian military last week, the Sunday Times reported on Sunday.

Quoting Middle Eastern diplomatic sources, the Times reported that the decision to down the Turkish jet was intended to signal a warning to NATO to stay out of the conflict raging in Syria for over a year.

Turkey's military insisted Sunday that a jet fighter shot down by Syrian forces on June 22 was in international airspace, and not inside Syria, as claimed in a newspaper report citing U.S. intelligence.

The Turkish F-4 Phantom "was downed over the eastern Mediterranean in international airspace ... while it was flying solo and unarmed, and testing our existing radars' performance in the region," the army's general staff said in a statement posted on its website.

Kuwait's Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed Al-Sabah on Sunday issued a decree accepting the resignation of the oil-rich Gulf state's cabinet, the official KUNA news agency reported.

The ruler also asked outgoing Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber Mubarak al-Sabah and other ministers to continue as a caretaker government until a new cabinet is formed.

An Israeli military court on Sunday sentenced a former military leader of Hamas to multiple life sentences after convicting him of ordering the killing of dozens of Israelis, the army said.

"The Ofer military court sentenced Ibrahim Hamed to 54 life sentences," a statement said, referring to an Israeli court and prison complex located in the West Bank between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Both official media and an opposition group on Sunday branded as a failure a world powers deal on a transition plan for Syria a day after at least 120 people were reported killed in violence nationwide.

World powers meeting in Geneva on Saturday agreed a transition plan that could include current regime members, but the West did not see any role for President Bashar Assad in a new unity government.

At least 21 people were killed in fighting across Syria on Sunday, a watchdog said, with rebels and regime troops clashing in several provinces as they battled for control of restive areas.

Regime forces shelled several areas of Damascus province, a day after mortar fire killed at least 30 civilians attending a funeral in the town of Zamalka, 10 kilometers (six miles) east of the capital, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Unknown assailants shot and wounded a Palestinian lawmaker in the city of Jenin overnight, he told AFP, after the city's governor was targeted in a shooting incident in early May.

Shami al-Shami, a member of the Fatah party of President Mahmoud Abbas, was hit in the thigh by two bullets, he told AFP, saying he was treated at a local hospital after the incident in the early hours of Sunday morning.