U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon is "dismayed" by the latest anti-Israel comments made by Iranian leaders, a spokesman said Friday.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's attack on Israel as being a "cancerous tumor" has already been condemned by the United States and France. Ahead of mass demonstrations in Tehran on Friday, supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that Israel will "disappear".

Russia welcomed the new international envoy for the conflict in Syria and said it expected him build on the work of predecessor Kofi Annan, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement Saturday.

"We proceed on the assumption that Lakhdar Brahimi will base his work on the platform of the existing 'road map' of a Syrian settlement -- Kofi Annan's peace plan and the final communique of the June ministerial meeting of the Action Group on Syria in Geneva and also on the relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions," the ministry said.

Russia on Friday rejected a proposal to set up no-fly zones to help civilians flee fighting in Syria's border areas after the United States said it was ready to consider the move.

"You have to solve citizen security issues using methods put in practice by international humanitarian law," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Sky News Arabia in an interview to be aired in full on Saturday and released to Russian media.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told an annual anti-Israel protest in Tehran on Friday that the Jewish state was a "cancerous tumor" that will soon be excised, drawing Western rebukes.

Washington said Ahmadinejad's statements were "reprehensible", while Paris viewed them as "outrageous."

Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran Algerian diplomat, will take over from Kofi Annan as the international envoy on the Syria conflict, the United Nations said Friday.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon appealed to the divided international powers to give "strong, clear and unified" support to the new envoy.

Humanitarian workers are being caught up in the fighting in Syria, threatening the supply of emergency medical aid to Syrian civilians, the British Red Cross said on Friday.

"Some of the worst fighting is now in Aleppo, and aid workers are at daily risk in the city," the charity said.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius called Friday for Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime to be "smashed fast" as he visited Turkey's largest refugee camp near the border.

"The Syrian regime should be smashed fast," Fabius told reporters. "After hearing the refugees and their account of the massacres of the regime, Mr. Bashar al-Assad doesn't deserve to be on this earth."

A member of the armed wing of Gaza's ruling Hamas movement died when a bomb he was guarding exploded accidently, the Palestinian militant group said on Friday.

The victim, Majed Khalout, was killed when the bomb exploded as he was patrolling the site where it was stored, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said in a statement.

The U.N.'s World Food Program said Friday it plans to feed one million people in Syria affected by the ongoing fighting, up from its initial target of 850,000.

Over 2,000 Syrians, including one defecting general, fled to Turkey on Thursday after a Syrian air strike on the northern rebel bastion of Aazaz in northern Syria, a Turkish diplomat said Friday.

The latest group of 2,204 people brought the number of Syrian refugees in Turkey to more than 62,000, the diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity.