The United Nations Security Council is mulling a French draft resolution regarding the importance of electing a new head of state in Lebanon and end the presidential deadlock.

According to a report published on Monday in the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, the Security Council is discussing ways to convince the political arch-foes to elect a new president to fortify state institutions and safeguard the country.

Lack of funds is forcing aid workers to deny Syrian war victims and other refugees with cancer the care they need, the U.N. refugee agency's top medical expert warned on Monday.

With millions of Syrians driven from their homes by three years of conflict, and huge numbers having fled a decade of violence in Iraq, health systems in the region have been overwhelmed.

Iran said Sunday that Syrian opposition chief Ahmad Jarba was the "most inappropriate person" to lead the war-torn country and confirmed it would send observers to next month's presidential election.

Jarba, president of the Syrian National Coalition, has sought to overthrow President Bashar Assad for the past three years. Earlier this month Jarba visited Washington and shared a podium with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

At least 10 people were killed in a car bomb attack Sunday targeting a regime-held area of the city of Homs in central Syria, the province's governor told Agence France Presse.

"Ten people were killed and 22 wounded in a car bomb attack on a collective taxi stand in Zahraa," a district inhabited by Alawites, the Shiite sect of President Bashar Assad, said Talal al-Barazi.

Syria's al-Qaida branch staged four suicide bomb attacks on army positions Sunday, leaving dozens of casualties, in a bid to cut off Idlib province from the coast, a monitoring group said.

The attacks came a day after the al-Nusra Front announced the creation of an arms factory.

Syria's air force on Saturday struck a besieged, rebel-held town near Damascus where U.N. and Red Crescent workers distributed aid, a monitoring group and activists said.

"Two air strikes hit Douma during a visit of a delegation of the United Nations to the town's outskirts," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Syrian President Bashar Assad Saturday thanked key ally Moscow for its support during a meeting in Damascus with a Russian delegation led by deputy premier Dimitry Rogozin, state media said.

The meeting comes days after Russia vetoed a draft U.N. resolution that would have referred crimes committed in Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Activists and a medic in war-torn Syria on Friday claimed President Bashar Assad's regime used chlorine gas a day earlier to attack opposition-held towns in Hama and Idlib provinces.

The reports could not be confirmed by independent sources, including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group.

Violence in Baghdad and north Iraq killed 17 people on Friday as throngs of Shiite pilgrims converged on the Iraqi capital for annual commemoration rituals amid heavy security.

The unrest comes as Iraq grapples with a protracted surge in bloodshed that has left more than 3,700 people dead so far this year and fulled fears the country is slipping back into all-out conflict.

The head of a state-tolerated opposition group said the June 3 presidential election in war-torn Syria will only deepen the country's divide and boost the "arrogance" of the regime.

The election, in which President Bashar Assad is expected to stomp to victory, will "divide the Syrian people into two different races: one that votes and the other a terrorist race that has not participated", said Louay Hussein, using the regime's term for its opponents in a more than three-year-old civil war.