A Syrian civil servant has been gunned down in the upscale Damascus neighborhood of Mazzeh, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday.

Ali Ballane, public relations director at the ministry of social affairs, was shot by four armed men at the Kanun restaurant on Thursday evening, said the Observatory which relies on a network of activists and doctors on the ground.

U.S. intelligence agencies are investigating accounts from European allies that Syria may have used chemical weapons in its war against opposition forces, a senior U.S. official said Thursday.

There were indications a "deeply suspicious" agent may have been used in recent battles in Syria but spy services were still evaluating the information and had not reached a definitive conclusion, the official told Agence France Presse.

Nearly seven million people need humanitarian assistance in Syria, a senior United Nations official said Thursday, criticizing Damascus for hampering aid distribution.

"The needs are growing rapidly and are most severe in the conflict and opposition-controlled areas" of the civil-war ravaged country, the global body's humanitarian chief Valerie Amos told the U.N. Security Council.

A late-night bombing at a coffee shop in west Baghdad killed at least 12 people on Thursday, the latest in a spike in violence just days ahead of Iraq's first elections since U.S. troops withdrew.

The 10:00 pm (1900 GMT) blast struck in the mostly-Sunni Amriyah neighborhood and also wounded 24 people, security and medical officials said. Among the dead were at least three children.

The leader of Egypt's tiny Jewish community was buried in Cairo on Thursday in a dilapidated cemetery that has come to symbolize the dying community.

More than a hundred mourners, including Christians and Muslims as well as Jews from both Egypt and abroad, attended the funeral of Carmen Weinstein under tight security in central Cairo's Shaar Hashamayim synagogue.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Thursday that the conflict raging in Syria could cleave it into rival enclaves, as he prepares for weekend talks on the crisis in Turkey.

The aim of the next Friends of Syria talks in Istanbul on Saturday is "to get everybody on the same page with respect to what post-Assad" Syria will look like, Kerry told U.S. senators, highlighting the need to ensure that "Qataris, Saudis, Emirates, Turks, Europeans" all have the same goals in mind.

Kuwait has donated $15 million to the United Nations to help war-torn Syria's 500,000 Palestinian refugees, the United Nations said on Thursday.

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, says half of the Palestinian refugees in Syria have been internally displaced by the conflict and that 45,000 have fled to neighboring Lebanon and Jordan.

Israeli President Shimon Peres on Thursday pardoned a Palestinian prisoner who had carried out two long-term hunger strikes, citing concerns over his health, a statement from his office said.

"Peres accepted the recommendation of the Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, in coordination with the security services, and signed the release of Mohammed Kamal al-Taj," the statement said.

Syrian troops captured a strategic village in central Homs province on Wednesday with the help of Hizbullah, putting pressure on rebel forces in the area, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog said.

The army seized Abel, on the main route between the city of Homs and Qusayr, a rebel stronghold near the border with Lebanon, the Observatory said.

Jordan is being dragged into Syria's conflict as more and more U.S. troops head to Amman, analysts say, amid a warning by Syrian President Bashar Assad the kingdom could be engulfed by his country's war.

"The escalation has become public. At the beginning of the crisis Jordan was trying to deal with it calmly, but now things are heading towards confrontation," Labib Kamhawi, a writer and political analyst told Agence France Presse.