Militants from Gaza on Wednesday fired two projectiles into southern Israel that exploded without causing casualties or damage, a military spokeswoman told Agence France Presse.

"They hit in open areas in the Eshkol region," she said. It was not immediately known if rockets or mortar rounds had been fired.

International peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is to head to Damascus on Thursday to meet Syria's President Bashar Assad, an Arab diplomat in Cairo said, as fresh bloodshed gripped the north of the country.

In a single incident, rebels killed at least 18 soldiers in a car bomb and ground attack on a military position in Idlib province of northwest Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

An armed mob protesting a film deemed offensive to Islam attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi Tuesday killing a U.S. official, hours after angry Islamists stormed Washington's embassy in Cairo.

Libya's deputy interior minister Wanis al-Sharif told Agence France Presse: "One American official was killed and another injured in the hand. The other staff members were evacuated and are safe and sound."

President Barack Obama will not receive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to the United States later this month, an Israeli official told Agence France Presse on Tuesday.

Netanyahu, who will be attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York, had asked for a meeting with Obama, proposing to travel to Washington for it, the official said

The trial of Libya's former spy chief Bouzid Dorda was adjourned indefinitely on Tuesday as defense lawyers challenged the legality of proceedings in the first case against a top Kadhafi official.

It was the fifth time since June 5 that the trial had been suspended at the request of defense lawyers.

France has helped a number of Syrian military figures to desert from President Bashar Assad's embattled regime, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Tuesday.

"We have contributed to a certain number of desertion operations," he told a parliamentary commission, without giving any further details.

Clashes resumed between the Syrian army and rebels in the northern city of Aleppo on Tuesday as several districts of the commercial hub came under shelling, a witness and a watchdog reported.

After an eerily quiet morning, a resident reported renewed regime bombardments of the Kalasseh and Bustan al-Qasr districts in the south, Suleiman al-Halabi in the center and Bustan al-Basha in the north.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday that the new U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi will meet Syrian President Bashar Assad when he travels to the conflict-ravaged country.

"Special representative Brahimi is soon going to have a meeting with Syrian authorities including president Assad, and he has already been engaged with the key stakeholders," Ban told a news conference in Bern, without providing more details about the highly anticipated visit.

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi travels on Thursday to Brussels for talks with European Union leaders on his first trip to Europe since his election, the EU said in a statement.

Morsi, who in June was elected Egypt's first Islamist leader following an uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak early last year, is due to meet EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso.

Egyptian authorities ordered the arrest of ousted strongman Hosni Mubarak's last Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq on Tuesday on suspicion of corruption, judicial sources said.

Shafiq, who has been living abroad in the United Arab Emirates since narrowly losing the first post-Mubarak elections to Islamist incumbent Mohamed Morsi in June, has been barred from travel using his Egyptian passport since last month.