Six Lebanese troops were killed and a soldier was injured Tuesday as militants staged an ambush against an army patrol in the outskirts of the town of Ras Baalbek on Syria's border.

An army statement said the patrol was conducting a “surveillance mission” in the area at 5:15 pm when it “fell into an armed ambush by a terrorist group.”

Aid workers fear a major humanitarian crisis for millions of Syrian refugees in the Middle East after funding gaps forced the United Nations to cut food assistance for 1.7 million people.

The U.N.'s World Food Program said Monday it needed $64 million (51 million euros) to fund its food voucher program for December alone, and that "many donor commitments remain unfulfilled."

Syria's civil war has killed more than 200,000 people in less than four years, a monitoring group told Agence France Presse on Tuesday, adding that most were fighters from the two sides.

"We have documented the killing of 202,354 people since March 2011," Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman said, adding that more than 130,000 of them were combatants.

The General Security Directorate stressed on Tuesday that head of the Free Syrian Army command council Colonel Abdullah Rifai is in its custody, denying that he was handed over to Hizbullah to swap him with Imad Ayyad.

“Rifai is still in our custody and his fate is linked to the negotiation process” of the abducted Lebanese soldiers and policemen, the General Security said.

The Army Intelligence has reportedly detained a wife of Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the family members of an al-Nusra Front official who has links to the August abduction of several Lebanese troops and policemen from the town of Arsal.

According to As Safir newspaper published on Tuesday, the Army Intelligence in cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies detained one of al-Baghdadi's wives at a border crossing.

A high-ranking military source denied on Tuesday that British troops are present in Lebanon to monitor the country's border with Syria to prevent fighters from the Islamic State group to infiltrate into the small Christian town of Ras Baalbek in the eastern Bekaa.

The source stressed in comments to al-Joumhouria newspaper that the a report published on Sunday in the British Telegraph is “no secret.”

NATO foreign ministers met in Brussels Tuesday aiming to plot a new course after a "year of aggression" from Ukraine to the Middle East and the end of the alliance's combat mission in Afghanistan.

New chief Jens Stoltenberg said as he arrived that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and other ministers from the 28-nation group would discuss how to "drive our alliance forward in a changing world."

Washington ruled out Monday any imminent plans to create a no-fly zone along the Turkey-Syria border, brushing aside reports that the White House is in talks with Ankara about a refugee safe haven.

President Barack Obama's spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters the U.S. was "open to discussing a range of options with the Turks" but that a no-fly zone over Syria was not on the table "at this point."

Warplanes from the U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State group hit dozens of jihadist vehicles and bases, including an "electronic warfare garrison," in four days of strikes, the U.S. military said Monday.

Between November 28 and December 1, coalition aircraft and drones bombed targets in Iraq and Syria, where they hit militants besieging the town of Kobane and IS headquarters in Raqa.

A Nazi war criminal who topped most wanted lists for his part in the Holocaust is "almost certain" to have died in Syria four years ago, a Nazi-hunting group said Monday.

"I am almost certain that he's no longer alive," Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, told Agence France-Presse.