A bomb was found overnight in Hay al-Sellom area in Beirut's southern suburbs allegedly signed by Syria's al-Nusra Front rebel group and directed against Hizbullah, media reports said on Wednesday.

Hizbullah members cordoned off the area and prevented security forces and a military expert from reaching the scene.

Jordan's health minister made an "urgent appeal" on Tuesday for around $355 million to provide medical care for hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees who have sought safety in the kingdom.

Mjalli Mheilan told state-run Petra news agency that the total number of Syrians in Jordan had now reached one million, a sharp rise on the previous figure of more than 475,000 given by Jordanian authorities.

France said Tuesday that it wanted to hold talks with its European partners and in the U.N. Security Council on whether to list Syria's Al-Nusra Front rebel group as a terrorist organization.

The move came after al-Qaida in neighboring Iraq confirmed that it had spawned and supervised the Al-Nusra Front, one of the key rebel spearheads in the armed uprising against Syria's President Bashar Assad.

Mortar fire killed at least one person on Tuesday in western Damascus near the headquarters of the Syrian government, Syrian state media reported.

"A citizen was martyred and two others were injured by mortar shells fired by terrorists this afternoon on the Kfar Sousa residential area," the official SANA news agency reported.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday said he would meet representatives of the Syrian opposition in London, speaking shortly before taking off from Israel for the British capital.

"I will be meeting with the Syrian opposition in London," he told reporters before departing from Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv after three days of talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

The mainstream Syrian rebel command distanced itself from the jihadist al-Nusra Front on Tuesday after al-Qaida in neighboring Iraq confirmed that it spawned and supervised the group.

The Free Syrian Army insisted that alliances it has struck with al-Nusra fighters on the ground were only tactical, local and time-limited, as al-Qaida openly admitted the Iraq links of one of the spearheads of the armed uprising against the Damascus regime.

Syria's umbrella opposition National Coalition on Tuesday condemned a powerful bomb blast in central Damascus that killed at least 15 people, and said the regime bore responsibility for the attack.

"The Syrian Coalition, on behalf of the Syrian people, condemns without any hesitation all bombings and hostilities against civilians, and considers these acts crimes against humanity," the group said in a statement.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-Moon on Tuesday called on Syria to approve and cooperate with a United Nations mission to probe the alleged use of chemical weapons in the country's conflict.

"I appeal to the government of Syria to extend its full cooperation and to allow the mission to proceed," Ban told reporters in Rome.

Iraq on Tuesday grounded and inspected a second Iranian aircraft bound for Syria in as many days, but found only humanitarian materiel, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's spokesman said.

The back-to-back searches come after Baghdad said last month it would step up such inspections, after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry publicly accused Iraq of turning a blind eye to Iranian flights which Washington says carry military equipment for the Damascus regime.

President Michel Suleiman condemned on Tuesday the latest deadly sectarian violence in Egypt, including an attack on the main cathedral in Cairo, and called for coexistence.

In a statement issued by his press office, Suleiman condemned “all acts that harm the history of coexistence among societies in the Arab world and mainly Egypt.”