Pope Benedict XVI has engaged the Catholic Church in pushing for peace in Syria by dispatching a high-profile delegation to a country where Christians are divided on support for the rebels.

Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, the pope's right-hand man, announced Benedict's move on Tuesday to a synod of bishops saying: "We cannot be mere spectators of a tragedy such as the one that is unfolding in Syria."

The Syrian authorities have tightened security measures around government buildings in Damascus for fear of new rebel attacks, a pro-government daily reported on Wednesday.

"Security measures around official buildings and companies," Al-Watan newspaper said.

A Saudi court has sentenced 16 Al-Qaida suspects to between three and 25 years for murder and attacks on the kingdom's oil facilities, the official SPA news agency reported Wednesday.

The defendants, 15 Saudi nationals and a Yemeni, were convicted of "carrying out terror attacks, targeting oil (sites), and carrying out assassinations," the report said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to adopt parts of a controversial report which proposes the government legalize unauthorized settler outposts, Israel's public radio said on Wednesday.

According to the radio, Netanyahu is looking to adopt some of the principles laid out in the so-called Levy report which was put together by three prominent Israeli jurists and presented to the ministerial committee on settlements in July.

Syrian warplanes Wednesday blitzed rebel targets around the strategic northern town of Maaret al-Numan while ground forces shelled opposition belts outside the capital Damascus, a watchdog said.

"The Syrian airforce have made no less than six sorties early morning, pounding the villages of Deir Sharqi, Maarhtat and Bsida, east of Maaret al-Numan," which rebels captured a week ago, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Turkey's Kurdish rebels will retaliate to any Turkish attacks on Kurds in war-torn Syria, the second in command of the outlawed PKK said in an interview published Wednesday.

"Turkey should stay out of this conflict and stop its scheming," Murat Karayilan, who heads the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the absence of its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan, told Swiss daily Le Temps.

Britain will close its full consulate in the southern Iraqi city of Basra as part of government austerity measures, Foreign Secretary William Hague said Monday.

The Foreign Office will keep an office in Basra, which was under British command following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but there will be no permanent staffing, Hague said.

New evidence implicating militias in executions after ousted Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi was captured and killed in Sirte last October 20 raises fresh questions over his death, a watchdog said on Wednesday.

"The evidence suggests that opposition militias summarily executed at least 66 captured members of Gadhafi's convoy in Sirte," his home town, said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Israeli airplanes carried out a sortie in the Gaza Strip early Wednesday morning, the army said, hours after a rocket from the enclave exploded in southern Israel.

Military "aircraft targeted a terror activity site in the northern Gaza Strip. A direct hit was confirmed," a statement read.

Foreign militants fighting in Syria could contribute to an increased "radicalization" of the conflict, members of a U.N. commission investigating rights abuses in the war-torn country said Tuesday.

"The presence of foreign militants, radical Islamists or jihadists, worries us very much," commission head Paulo Sergio Pinheiro told reporters, estimating there were hundreds of foreign combatants on the ground in Syria.