The Syrian army killed at least 23 civilians in two protest cities on Saturday, a watchdog said, as an international outcry mounted over a massacre in a central village.

U.N. observers who visited the village of Al-Kubeir, near Hama, said they witnessed blood on the walls and "a strong stench of burnt flesh," prompting Western governments to launch a push for tough new sanctions against Damascus.

Amnesty International on Friday condemned the "alarming" increase in executions in Iraq, which has put at least 70 people to death this year, and urged Baghdad to stop using the death penalty.

"The killing of Abd Hmoud is part of an alarming escalation in executions in Iraq and we fear others may soon face the same fate," Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa deputy director, said in a statement.

Tunisia's decision to extradite Libya's former prime minister Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi back to his home country is definitive, Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali told Agence France Presse on Friday.

"The decision to hand over Mr. Mahmoudi is irrevocable," he said, without providing a date for the extradition of the former premier, a stalwart of slain Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s fallen regime.

Britain, France and the United States will quickly draw up a U.N. Security Council resolution proposing sanctions against Syria over the worsening conflict, diplomats said Friday.

Vandals overnight slashed car tires and sprayed graffiti at a mixed Arab-Jewish community west of Jerusalem in an attack which bore the hallmarks of an act of settler revenge.

An Agence France Presse journalist said cars in the village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam or Oasis of Peace were sprayed with slogans including "Death to the Arabs" and "Revenge" in Hebrew.

Former U.N. chief Kofi Annan, the author of a fledgling peace plan on Syria, called Friday for "additional pressure" in the wake of a new massacre as he held talks in the United States.

Opening a meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.N.-Arab League envoy said he would discuss "how we can put additional pressure on the government and the parties to get the plan implemented."

United Nations observers on Friday reached the Syrian village of Al-Kubeir where dozens of residents were massacred two days ago, activists told Agance France Press.

The monitors on Thursday were fired at by gunmen and forced to turn back as they tried to reach the village located in a farming region in the central province of Hama.

Shootings and bombings in Iraq on Friday killed four people, including a parliamentary official and a senior emergency officer, officials said.

In Baghdad, civil defense Colonel Mohammed Yunis was killed and his wife and two children were wounded when gunmen opened fire on the family's car just outside the capital's heavily-fortified Green Zone, home to parliament and the U.S. embassy, an interior ministry official and a medical source said.

France backs U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan's bid to bring key powers into a contact group on the Syria crisis, but it opposes bringing Iran into the group, the foreign ministry said Friday.

"We are favorable to any initiative that can help put into operation the Annan plan," foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero told reporters.

Russia said Friday after talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Syria envoy that it was unaware of any plans by President Bashar al-Assad to leave power.

Senior Russian diplomats said they also told special envoy Fred Hof that Moscow was willing to agree changes to international envoy Kofi Annan's peace plan for Syria as long as they kept the tattered initiative alive.