Some 20,000 people gathered Thursday in the Syrian city of Daraa for the burial of victims killed by police gunfire the day before, chanting support for a rising anti-regime movement there, rights activists said.

One activist in Daraa, contacted by telephone, said the mourners made their way from the Omari mosque, where protesters have been holed up for a week, to the burial grounds under pouring rain, chanting: "With our souls, with our blood, we are loyal to our martyrs."

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad held talks with Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblat in Damascus on Thursday, Syria's state-run news agency, SANA, reported.

Following his return to Lebanon, Jumblat said in a statement that the meeting was part of the "continuous communication and consultations with the Syrian leadership," describing the talks as "excellent, friendly and frank."

A leaked U.S. Embassy cable published exclusively in Al-Akhbar on Thursday reported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as saying that Syria would enter a war with Israel should it invade Lebanon.

Assad informed his biographer American journalist David Lesch that the image of the invincible Israeli army was destroyed during the July 2006 war, said the WikiLeaks cable dated July 25, 2006.

Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblat reportedly said immediately after the end of the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah that if the Jewish state pulled out from occupied Lebanese territories, it would abolish an essential pressure point off the Shiite group.

Israel “is speeding up the withdrawal,” Jumblat said during a meeting dated August 15, 2006, according to a WikiLeaks cable published by al-Akhbar newspaper on Thursday.

Caretaker Justice Minister Ibrahim Najjar said on Thursday that threats about the prosecution of some March 14 officials over WikiLeaks cables had political rather than legal dimensions.

“No one is taking the minutes (of the alleged meetings), there are no accurate dates, the content isn’t precise, and the translation” isn’t checked, Najjar told al-Mustaqbal newspaper in remarks published Thursday.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad held talks Wednesday in Damascus with Marada Movement leader MP Suleiman Franjieh, Syria's state-run news agency SANA reported.

Talks tackled "the efforts being exerted to form a new Lebanese cabinet and the situations in the Arab region," according to SANA.

The Israeli army is reportedly preparing for the possibility that Syria might use Hizbullah to launch attacks on the Jewish state to divert attention from the growing protests against President Bashar Assad’s regime.

The Israeli daily Haaretz on Wednesday quoted intelligence officials as saying that despite their earlier assessments that the Syrian regime was stable, and the unrest sweeping the Arab world would not affect it, they now believe it will be very hard for Assad to restore the status quo ante.

Speaker Nabih Berri stressed on the importance of speeding up the formation of the Lebanese cabinet, denying that Syria rejected efforts to form the new government.

In his remarks to As Safir daily published on Tuesday, Berri said that accusations about the lack of a Syrian green light on the cabinet are not true.

An exiled cousin of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warned his regime Monday it only had a "small window of opportunity" to introduce reform or face being overthrown by a mounting protest movement.

"You have to move very quickly. This is a very small window of opportunity," Ribal al-Assad, head of the London-based Organization for Democracy and Freedom in Syria, urged the Middle East state in an interview with Agence France Presse.

Some 30 women gathered in Beirut on Monday, Mother's Day, demanding information on the fate of their children and loved ones who went missing during the country's civil war and who are presumably being held in Syria.

"I just want to see my son once more before I die," cried Hana, 60, whose son Mustafa disappeared in 1988 at the age of 16.