Syrian regime forces opened fire on protesters in the Douma area near the capital on Friday, as at least 43 people were killed in violence across the country, a rights group and activists said.

Regime forces killed 13 people in the countryside around Damascus, eight in the central province of Homs, nine in the northern city of Aleppo and its countryside, three in the central province of Hama, three in the northwestern province of Idlib, two in the coastal province of Latakia, two in the Damascus neighborhood of al-Mazzeh, two in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor and one in the southern province of Daraa, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, reported.

Germany on Friday urged Russia to curb its support for Damascus, ahead of President Vladimir Putin's visit to Berlin and Paris that is set to be dominated by the escalating Syria crisis.

"In our view Russia should recognize that we are not working against Russian strategic interests when we want to stop the violence in Syria," Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told Die Welt ahead of Putin's arrival.

An Israeli soldier and a Palestinian militant died in a shootout between the militant and troops near the border with the Gaza Strip early Friday, the military said.

The exchange of fire began after the militant crossed the fence separating the Hamas-run coastal strip and southern Israel.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Thursday that any military action in Syria would need backing from the United Nations, but called recent violence "intolerable."

Asked if he could foresee a scenario in which the United States would back military intervention even without U.N. authorization, Panetta said: "No, I cannot envision that."

Lawyers for fugitive Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, charged with running a death squad, called Thursday for officials including Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to give evidence at his trial.

The three-judge panel hearing the case denied the request, however, and after receiving testimony from five witnesses who all said the senior Sunni official orchestrated attacks in the latest episode of Hashemi's trial in absentia, adjourned the trial until June 19.

Two American tourists kidnapped in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula by Bedouin tribesman were released on Thursday after less than 24 hours in captivity, security and government officials told Agence France Presse.

The two men were in good health and police were escorting them to a safe place, where they were due to meet the South Sinai governor, the officials said.

Egypt's decades-long state of emergency came to an end on Thursday after its last renewal expired, the ruling military said in a statement, vowing to continue to "protect" the nation.

The military will continue its "national and historic responsibility, taking into account that the state of emergency has ended, in accordance with the constitutional declaration and with the law," it said.

Russia has worked "constructively" on the Syria crisis at the U.N. Security Council, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday, a day before she hosts talks with the Russian president.

"Russia has cooperated constructively in the U.N. Security Council," Merkel told a press conference in the German town of Stralsund at the end of a Baltic Sea summit of heads of government from 11 countries.

Syria-based insurgents fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad on Thursday took to task their exiled leadership, in a stark show of divisions within the armed opposition.

"Nobody has the right to issue press releases, take decisions, or speak about operations in the Free Syrian Army's name, except for the FSA command inside Syria," the group's spokesman Colonel Qassem Saadeddine told Agence France Presse.

Syrian troops resumed their shelling of the Houla region on Thursday, killing at least one person at the site of a massacre of 108 people last week, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"A boy was shot dead today by a sniper," Britain-based Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told Agence France Presse.