Israel is trying to thaw the frosty relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the White House, and set up a meeting with President Barack Obama, an Israeli newspaper said on Friday.

A report in the Maariv daily said National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror was in Washington and had been "meeting senior White House officials for the past two days in an attempt to reach certain understandings regarding the red lines that must be set for the Iranian nuclear program."

President Bashar Assad has hit out at Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, accusing them of arming Syrian rebels but insisting they will not win, according to excerpts from an interview to appear in an Egyptian newspaper on Friday.

"They suddenly saw money in their hands after a long period of poverty and think they can buy history and play a regional role," Assad told al-Ahram al-Arabi, which put excerpts from the interview on its website on Thursday.

Up to 200 people protested without incident in front of France's embassy in Tehran on Thursday over a French satirical weekly's publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

The protesters chanted "Death to France," as well as Iran's arch-foes Israel and the United States, as dozens of police deployed around the embassy compound in central Tehran prevented the crowd from approaching.

Israel will not attend a conference on the creation of a nuclear-free Middle East scheduled to take place in Finland, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Thursday.

"This announcement was made on Wednesday in Vienna during a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by the director of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, Shaul Horev," spokesman Yigal Palmor told Agence France Presse.

Iran will never bend to pressure exerted by the world's big powers, even if they become "angry" at its defiance, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech published on his official website on Wednesday.

The Islamic republic "does not accept the demands of any superpower," he told an audience of military personnel and their families in the speech delivered on Tuesday in northern Iran, according to his website, www.leader.ir.

The Syrian regime had considered supplying chemical weapons to Hizbullah as a war between the party and Israel will “only be good for Syria,” the former head of Syria's chemical arsenal told The Times newspaper in an interview published Wednesday.

Major-General Adnan Sillu said he defected from the Syrian army three months ago after being party to top-levels talks about the use of chemical weapons on both rebel fighters and civilians.

Iran and the U.N. nuclear agency are looking to hold a new meeting in mid-October, despite Tehran's atomic chief suggesting the watchdog has been infiltrated by "terrorists," diplomats told Agence France Presse on Tuesday.

Four envoys said that plans were being made for the meeting, which would follow one between Iran's nuclear agency chief Fereydoon Abbasi Davani and International Atomic Energy Agency director general Yukiya Amano in Vienna on Monday.

The international peace envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi on Tuesday met Syrians staying at a Turkish refugee camp in his first encounter since taking over the mission from his frustrated predecessor.

The U.N.-Arab League envoy met representatives of some 1,300 Syrians at Altinozu camp in Hatay city, located on the border with their violence-racked homeland.

Foreign ministers of the regional "contact group" on Syria agreed at talks in Cairo to hold more consultations in New York later this month, the official MENA news agency reported on Tuesday.

The top diplomats of Egypt, Turkey and Iran met in Cairo to discuss developments in conflict-stricken Syria, but Saudi Arabia, which is also a member of the group, was notably absent from the meeting.

Iran is proposing it, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey dispatch observers to its ally Syria in an effort to quell the violence there, state media reported on Tuesday.

Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi put forward the suggestion at a regional "contact group" meeting held in Cairo on Monday, the official news agency IRNA and broadcaster IRIB said.