A Beirut-based satellite television channel said that one of its cameramen was killed on Saturday while covering the fighting in eastern Syria.

Omar Abdel Qader, who was killed in Deir Ezzor, worked for the privately owned Al-Mayadeen station which supports the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

An Internal Security Forces Unit exchanged fir on Tuesday with suspects during a raid in the Taamir Ain el-Hilweh area in the southern city of Sidon.

The state-run National News Agency reported that the raided the area in search for wanted suspects.

Syrian forces captured Saturday a rebel-held town near a famed Crusader castle in the strategic province of Homs, after nearly a month of fighting, the army said.

"Syrian army units, in cooperation with the National Defense Force and honorable residents, took full control of the town of Zara and its surroundings in the western Homs countryside," a statement said.

Rockets hit on Saturday a town in the Bekaa a day after the Qaida-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant claimed an attack on nearby areas.

The state-run National News Agency reported that two rockets fired the eastern mountain range landed near Hermel public hospital.

Syria was removing its chemical arsenal at "an increased pace" with almost a third of its stockpile having been taken out of the war-torn country, the world's chemical watchdog said on Friday.

But Damascus remained behind schedule as yet another target date loomed next week, ahead of a June 30 deadline to hand over or destroy its arsenal, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said in The Hague.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon spotlighted the plight of children in war-torn Syria Friday, saying more than 2 million were not getting an education due to the bloody, three-year conflict.

Some 40 percent of schools have been damaged or used as shelter by people fleeing their homes, the secretary general added.

Saudi Arabia on Friday listed the Muslim Brotherhood and two Syrian jihadist groups as terrorist organizations, and ordered citizens fighting abroad to return within 15 days or face imprisonment.

The move represents a major escalation against the Muslim Brotherhood of deposed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and indicates rising concern in Riyadh over the possible return of battle-hardened Saudi extremists from Syria.

A Beirut-based Danish journalist has been freed after being abducted in Lebanon and held hostage for almost one month, his former employer, Danish broadcaster DR, said on Friday.

"Jeppe Nybroe was abducted just under a month ago, while he was in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, near the Syrian border," DR said on its website.

Violence in Iraq, including shelling in a city held by anti-government fighters for over two months, killed 10 people on Friday, among them a senior police officer, officials said.

Iraq has been hit by a year-long surge in bloodshed that has reached levels not seen since 2008, driven principally by widespread discontent among its Sunni Arab minority and by the civil war in neighboring Syria.

A number of rockets fired from the Syrian side of the border landed in the Bekaa region on Friday, announced the army in a statement, in an attack that was later claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The army said three rockets landed in the outskirts of the towns of al-Labweh and al-Nabi Othman.