Only crippling sanctions against Iran's central bank and its oil and gas industries will force Tehran to halt its nuclear drive, a senior Israeli minister said in remarks published on Tuesday.

According to the Maariv newspaper, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the only thing which would cause Iran's Islamic regime to sit up and listen was a series of "crippling sanctions."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared Monday that the Obama administration would work with ascendant Islamist parties of the Muslim world, answering one of the central U.S. policy questions resulting from the Arab Spring.

Delivering an address at the National Democratic Institute, Clinton offered a forthright embrace of the democratic changes enveloping North Africa and the Middle East at a time when the euphoria of the successful revolutions from Egypt to Libya is giving way to the hard and unprecedented work of creating stable democracies.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Monday it will begin this week to clear unexploded munitions in Libya's Bani Walid and Sirte, where several civilians have been hurt or killed by explosives.

"The ICRC will clear unexploded munitions in Sirte and Bani Walid, focusing on the contaminated areas that pose the greatest threat to civilians, especially some of the least destroyed neighborhoods where people are attempting to return to their homes," said the relief agency in a statement.

British Foreign Minister William Hague called Monday for "ever-increasing" international pressure, rather than military intervention, to end the violent repression in Syria.

"I don't think the answer to (the repression) now or subsequently would be a military intervention from outside," Hague told reporters in Strasbourg after a meeting of Council of Europe ministers.

Syria has sent the Arab League a letter asking for support against what it called U.S. involvement in "bloody events" in the country, the 22-member pan-Arab group said in a statement on Monday.

The statement said the letter from Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem accused Washington "of actual involvement in bloody events in Syria" and asked the League to "condemn the involvement and to do what is necessary to end it."

Twelve Jewish settlers, seven of them minors, were arrested on Monday when Israeli police dismantled three structures in a settlement outpost near Ramallah, an Israeli police spokeswoman said.

The arrests occurred early on Monday as police and troops demolished three structures set up illegally in the unauthorized settlement outpost of Oz Zion east of Ramallah, spokeswoman Luba Samri told Agence France Presse.

Three Palestinians were wounded by Israeli gunfire east of Gaza City on Monday, a Gaza medical official and the Israeli military said.

"Three Palestinians were wounded by Israel fire in the Shejaiyah district east of Gaza City," emergency services spokesman Adham Abu Selmiya told Agence France Presse, saying one was moderately hurt and the other two sustained light injuries.

Syrian troops entered Monday the Homs neighborhood of Baba Amro and "started demolishing shops," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Residents there saw a truck "filled with corpses," it added.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the United States and Israel of seeking world support for a military strike on Iran, in comments published Monday in which he also warned against attacks on his country.

Ahmadinejad, in an interview with Egypt's state-owned Al-Akhbar newspaper, lashed out at Israel after its president, Shimon Peres, warned at the weekend that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely.

Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ahmed Khatami warned the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Monday not to become "an instrument without will in the hands of the United States" against Iran.

The hardline cleric hit out at IAEA director general Yukiya Amano in an address during communal prayers in Tehran marking the Muslim Eid al-Adha feast.