Nearly 60 people were reported killed in violence across Syria on Monday despite a hard-won ceasefire and the upcoming deployment of 300 U.N. observers to monitor the truce, a watchdog said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday a total 54 civilians and five soldiers were killed in various provinces.

Syria's embattled President Bashar al-Assad is "finished" and will eventually leave power "dead or alive," his Tunisian counterpart Moncef Marzouki said in a newspaper interview published on Tuesday.

"The Russians, Chinese and Iranians," who have been supporting Assad since an uprising against his rule erupted last year, "must understand that this man (Assad) is finished and that it is no longer possible to defend him," Marzouki told the pan-Arab Al-Hayat daily.

Israel decided on Tuesday to legalese three settler outposts, which the Palestinians denounced as a response to a letter from president Mahmoud Abbas demanding a halt to settlement activity if peace talks are to resume.

A ministerial committee has decided "to formalize the status of three communities which were established in the 1990s," the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

A news website editor was charged with anti-regime incitement on Monday, a prosecutor said, after he published allegations over a graft probe into a $7 billion project.

"Jamal Muhtaseb, chief editor of Gerasa News, was charged with incitement against the regime today," the military state security court prosecutor told Agence France Presse without elaborating, speaking on condition of anonymity.

U.S. President Barack Obama Monday ordered new sanctions on Syria and Iran and the "digital guns for hire" who help them oppress their people with surveillance software and monitoring technology.

Obama announced additions to the pile of U.S. sanctions already faced by the two governments as part of a wider effort to crack down on human rights abuses, atrocities and genocide, at a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

Syrian troops killed 44 people across the country on Monday, including 34 civilians in the central city of Hama alone, monitors said, as U.N. military observers toured protest centers near the capital and both the European Union and the United States imposed new sanctions.

Regime forces killed 35 people in Hama, three in the southern province of Daraa, two in the central province of Homs, one in the northwestern province of Idlib and one in the eastern protest hub of Deir Ezzor, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.

An Israeli military court on Monday rejected appeals by two Palestinian prisoners who have been refusing food for 55 days, their lawyer and a Palestinian prisoner rights NGO said.

"We just confirmed with Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahla's families that both their appeals were rejected today," a spokeswoman for prisoner rights group Addameer told Agence France Presse.

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired a rocket which hit open ground in southern Israel on Monday, without causing casualties, Israeli police said.

"There was a rocket that was fired... No damage or injuries were caused," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.

Egypt said on Monday it formally requested that Israel look into a statement attributed to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in which he described Egypt as more "worrying" than Israel's arch-nemesis Iran.

A foreign ministry statement said Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel Amr asked Cairo's ambassador in Tel Aviv to request "clarifications on the accuracy of the statement attributed to the Israeli foreign minister."

Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan, said he opposes the sale of F-16 warplanes to Iraq while Nouri al-Maliki is premier, as he fears they would be used against the region.

The United States has agreed to sell 36 F-16 jets to Baghdad in a multi-billion-dollar deal aimed at increasing the capabilities of Iraq's fledgling air force, a weak point in its national defenses.