Syrian regime forces killed 55 civilians in clashes and shelling across the country Sunday, while at least 14 soldiers loyal to President Bashar Assad also died, activists and a rights group said.

Twenty-three people were killed in the central opposition bastion of Homs, nine in the central province of Hama, seven in the southern province of Daraa, 11 in the northwestern province of Idlib, three in the Damascus neighborhood of Kfarsouseh and two in the restive suburbs around Damascus, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.

The fall of Syria's President Bashar Assad would end an axis with Iran and its President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, benefiting Israel, the country's intelligence minister said on Sunday.

"There is an Assad-Ahmadinejad axis, a Tehran-Damascus axis," Israeli intelligence minister Dan Meridor told military radio. "Breaking this axis would be good for Israel."

Syrians were voting on Sunday on a new constitution in the face of opposition calls for a boycott and deadly violence that Washington has said made the exercise "laughable."

The new text ends the legal basis for the five-decade stranglehold on power of the ruling Baath party but leaves huge powers in the hands of President Bashar al-Assad.

American war correspondent Marie Colvin was killed while trying to retrieve her shoes so she could flee an army bombardment in the Syrian city of Homs, her employer The Sunday Times said.

Colvin and a group of other journalists had all followed the local custom of removing their footwear before entering a building in the besieged city which was being used as a rebel press center, it said.

Iranian warships that docked in Saudi Arabia this month were part of a "training tour for students" in the Islamic republic's navy, the state news agency SPA reported on Saturday.

It said officials at Tehran's embassy in Riyadh submitted a request for two ships and a helicopter to dock at Jeddah between February 1 and 7.

Negotiations between the International Committee of the Red Cross, Syrian authorities and opposition groups to evacuate the wounded from Baba Amr in Homs on Saturday ended in failure, the IRCR said.

The "ICRC and Syrian Arab Red Crescent have been negotiating since this morning with both the Syrian authorities and opposition groups in Homs. The discussion has yielded no concrete result today. Unfortunately, therefore, no emergency evacuation will take place today," a spokesman told Agence France Presse.

Bahrain's main opposition formation al-Wefaq said on Saturday that a woman had died from tear gas inhalation, noting that "violations" by the authorities have increased over the past several months.

A woman in her 70s, "Abdat al-Hussein, died because of the excessive use of tear gas by security forces in al-Sahla" region, said the Shiite grouping without giving further details.

Rockets fired from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip slammed into southern Israel on Saturday without causing casualties or damage, a police spokesman said.

"Two rockets were fired and landed in uninhabited areas near the town of Sderot," spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

The people of north Africa's Maghreb region "need and deserve" to determine their own future, U.S. Secretary State Hillary Clinton said in Algeria Saturday, ahead of elections there in May.

Clinton was speaking during a brief visit to the country a day after attending a "Friends of Syria" international gathering in neighboring Tunisia, and hours before flying on to Morocco.

Anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr attacked Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as a "dictator" hungry for acclaim, a statement and officials from his movement said on Saturday.

The charge, from a key member of Maliki's unity government, could indicate a new round of political conflict after a tentative improvement in a row pitting Maliki's Shiite-led government against the secular Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc.