DAMASCUS, Syria: Muslims began observing the dawn-to-dusk fast for the month of Ramadan across the Middle East on Wednesday, even as the region is shaken by the crisis in Egypt and the U.N. food agency warned that Syria’s civil war has left 7 million people in need of food aid.

Ramadan this year comes during the harsh Mideast summer, and governments in the region took steps to help alleviate the fast, offering shorter working hours, promising less power cuts and even distributing food to weary motorists.

The Muslim lunar calendar moves back through the seasons, so Ramadan starts 11 days earlier each year under the Western calendar.

For most Sunnis and Shiites, Ramadan started on Wednesday while others are expected to begin observing the holy month on Thursday — differences based on various interpretations of sightings of the new moon.

Despite its apparent harshness, many Muslims eagerly anticipate Ramadan, the month when they believe God revealed the first verses of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, to the Prophet Muhammad. Streets are decorated with colorful lanterns, families feast together at night, the devout pray even more and regional cooking shows obsess over new takes on classic dishes for the Ramadan evening meal that breaks the daytime fasting.

Bahraini men gather to search the sky over the Persian Gulf for the crescent moon in the western vil …

But the hardships in Syria, where the civil war is now in its third year, have eroded much of the Ramadan joy.

On Wednesday, the World Food Program said it needed $27 million every month to deal with the growing ranks of Syrians made hungry because of the war. If the organization did not provide for them, “they simply will not eat,” said Muhannad Hadi, WFP’s emergency coordinator in Syria.

Syria’s conflict erupted in March 2011 as an Arab Spring-inspired uprising against President Bashar Assad’s regime. It has since descended into a civil war that has killed over 93,000 people, displaced over 5 million and turned over 1.5 million into refugees, according to U.N. figures.

“People come by the kitchen just begging for scraps, it tears the heart,” said an activist in the rebel-held northern Syrian city of Maarat al-Numan.

The activist, who identified himself only by his nickname, Abu Anas, fearing for his own safety, said rebel activists were using a communal kitchen to distribute a simple Ramadan evening meal of rice, vegetable stew and soup to some 400 of the town’s neediest families.

A Lebanese man reads a Quran, the Muslim holy book, at a mosque in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, July  …

Food prices have risen five-fold in Syria over the past months and shortages in fuel are widespread. Farmers have abandoned their fields, setting the stage for a broader disaster next year, the WFP has warned.

The Syrian currency fell further, to 280 pounds for one U.S. dollar on Wednesday, after recovering from a record low of 310 pounds to the dollar on Tuesday. The falling pound is likely to further push up prices.

“I can’t buy necessities anymore,” lamented Qassem al-Zamel, a 37-year-old employee in Damascus. “”Yesterday, I bought 2 kilograms of potatoes, one kilogram of beans and two kilograms of tomatoes with 1,000 pounds. I stopped buying meat.”

Supermarket owner Adib Mardini, 62, said he was changing food prices by the hour on some days but there were few shoppers around. “People have run out of money,” he said.

By contrast, police in the oil-rich Gulf Emirate of Abu Dhabi planned to distribute nearly 30,000 sunset meals to drivers at gas stations or traffic lights in an attempt to prevent traffic accidents by speeding motorists rushing home for iftar, the meal that breaks the fast.

Lebanese men pray and read the Quran, the Muslim holy book, at a mosque in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesda …

With temperatures in Dubai and elsewhere reaching 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), authorities ordered reduced working hours.

In the Palestinian territories, the local self-government reduced the working day to five hours. The Palestinian minister of religious affairs, Mahmoud al-Habbash, said this would give people enough time for worshipping God.

“People, who spend long parts of the night praying …. should be given enough time to have some sleep in the morning,” said Mahmoud Al-Habbash.

In Egypt, where the military deposed Islamist President Mohammed Morsi last week following days of massive protests against his rule, the new interim leader called for reconciliation in Ramadan, traditionally a period for Muslims to promote unity.

BEIRUT: Activists say Syrian rebels have gained control of a key military base in the central Hama province after intense clashes with regime forces.

The base is on the northern edge of the town of Morek, which straddles the country’s strategic north-south highway leading to theprovince of Aleppo.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the rebels seized the base after intense clashes with regime forces on Thursday.

The Observatory says the rebels killed six government troops and seized weapons and ammunition. A video posted on Hama activists’ Facebook page shows flames rising from the burning compound and the bodies of some of the killed fighters.

President Bashar Assad’s forces are waging an offensive to drive rebels out of the central provinces of Hama and Homs, and the northern Aleppo province.

WASHINGTON: Israel launched an airstrike into Syria, apparently targeting a suspected weapons site, U.S. officials said Friday night.

The strike occurred overnight Thursday into Friday, the officials told The Associated Press. It did not appear that a chemical weapons site was targeted, they said, and one official said the strike appeared to have hit a warehouse.

The U.S. officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Israel has targeted weapons in the past that it believes are being delivered to the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah. Earlier this week, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said his group would assist Syrian President Bashar Assad if needed in the effort to put down a 2-year-old uprising.

Israeli Embassy spokesman Aaron Sagui would not comment Friday night specifically on the report of an Israeli strike into Syria.

“What we can say is that Israel is determined to prevent the transfer of chemical weapons or other game-changing weaponry by the Syrian regime to terrorists, specially to Hezbollah in Lebanon,” Sagui said in an email to the AP.

In 2007, Israeli jets bombed a suspected nuclear reactor site along the Euphrates River in northeastern Syria, an attack that embarrassed and jolted the Assad regime and led to a buildup of the Syrian air defense system. Russia provided the hardware for the defense systems upgrade and continues to be a reliable supplier of military equipment to the Assad regime.

The airstrike, first reported by CNN, came hours before President Barack Obama told reporters at a news conference in Costa Rica on Friday that he didn’t foresee a scenario in which the U.S. would send troops to Syria. More than 70,000 peoples have died and hundreds of thousands have fled the country as the Assad regime has battled rebels.

The Israeli strike also follows days of renewed concerns that Syria might be using chemical weapons against opposition forces. Obama has characterized evidence of the use of chemical weapons as a “game-changer” that would have “enormous consequences.”

While the U.S. has been providing nonlethal aide to opposition forces in Syria, even stepping up that form of support in recent days, the Obama administration has resisted calls from some American lawmakers to arm the rebels or to work to establish a no-fly zone to aid the insurgency.

On Thursday, however, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the administration is rethinking its opposition to providing arms to the rebels. He said it was one of several options as the U.S. consults with allies about steps to be taken to drive Assad from power. Officials in the administration who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss strategy said earlier this week that arming the opposition forces was seen as more likely than any other military option.

Obama followed Hagel’s comments by saying options will continue to be evaluated, though he did not cite providing arms specifically. Concerns that U.S. weapons could end up in the hands of al-Qaida-linked groups helping the Syrian opposition or other extremists, including Hezbollah, have stood in the way of that change in strategy.

“We want to make sure that we look before we leap and that what we’re doing is actually helpful to the situation as opposed to making it more deadly or more complex,” Obama said Thursday at a news conference in Mexico.

BEIRUT: Activists say Syrian rebels have captured a strategic town near the border with Jordan after a day of fierce battles that killed 38 people.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says 16rebels were among the dead in the fighting in and around Dael that ended early on Friday.

The town lies only miles from the Jordanian border in Daraa province where the uprising against President Bashar Assad’s regime began in 2011.

The region is considered a gateway to Damascus. Clashes there have recently intensified as rebels try to push on to the Syrian capital.

The battle for Dael came as a mortar attack on Damascus University killed at least 10 students on Thursday. The U.N. says Syria’s civil war has killed more than 70,000 people.

AMMAN, Jordan: Mideast powers opposed to PresidentBashar Assad have dramatically stepped up weapons supplies toSyrian rebels in coordination with the U.S. in preparation for a push on the capital of Damascus, officials and Western military experts said Wednesday.

A carefully prepared covert operation is arming rebels, involving Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, with the United States and other Western governments consulting, and all parties hold veto power over where the shipments are directed, according to a senior Arab official whose government is participating. His account was corroborated by a diplomat and two military experts.

The Arab official said the number of arms airlifts has doubled in the past four weeks. He did not provide exact figures on the flights or the size of the cargo. Jordan opened up as a new route for the weapons late last year, amid U.S. worries that arms from Turkey were going to Islamic militants, all four told The Associated Press in separate interviews. Jordan denies helping funnel weapons to the rebels.

The two military experts, who closely follow the traffic, said the weapons include more powerful, Croatian-made anti-tank guns and rockets than the rebels have had before.

The Arab official said there was a “master plan” for the rebels to seize Damascus. He and the diplomat spoke to the AP on condition that their identities and their nationalities not be disclosed because the operation was covert.

“The idea is that the rebels now have the necessary means to advance from different fronts — north from Turkey and south from Jordan — to close in on Damascus to unseat Assad,” the Arab official said. He declined to provide details, but said the plan is being prepared in stages and will take “days or weeks” for results.

Rebels have captured suburbs around Damascus but have been largely unable to break into the heavily guarded capital. Instead, they have hit central neighborhoods of the city with increasingly heavy mortar volleys from their positions to the northeast and south.

But rebels in the south are fighting to secure supply lines from the border with Jordan to the capital, and the new influx of weapons from Jordan has fueled the drive, a rebel commander in a southwestern suburb of the capital said. The consensus among the multiple rebel groups was that Damascus is the next objective, he added.

“There is an attempt to secure towns and villages along the international line linking Amman and Damascus. Significant progress is being made. The new weapons come in that context,” said the commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of Syrian government reprisal. He said his own fighters on the capital’s outskirts had not received any arms from the influx but that he had heard about the new weapons from comrades in the south.

Syria’s rebels, who are divided into numerous independent brigades, have long complained that the international community is not providing them with the weaponry needed to oust Assad, drawing out a civil war that in the past two years has killed more than 70,000 people and displaced 3.5 million Syrians, nearly a third of them fleeing into neighboring countries.

But the United States in particular has been wary of arming the rebellion, fearing weapons will go to Islamic extremists who have taken a prominent role in the uprising. Washington says it is only providing non-lethal aid to the rebels. The U.S. involvement in the arms channels opened up by its regional allies is aimed at ensuring the weapons are not going to militants.

The Arab official, the diplomat and the military experts said the material was destined for “secular” fighters not necessarily linked to the Free Syrian Army, the nominal umbrella group for the rebels. Jordan and other Arabs have been critical of the FSA, which they accuse of having failed as an effective or credible force because its elements lack the fighting skills and military prowess.

The four described a system in which Saudi Arabia and Qatar provide the funding for the weapons, while Jordan and Turkey provide the land channels for the shipments to reach the rebels, while all coordinate with the U.S. and other Western governments on the shipments’ destinations. All must agree for a shipment to go through. The Arab official said some of the arms are being purchased from Croatia, or from U.S. drawdowns in unspecified European countries. He said other sources were black market arms dealers across Europe and the Mideast.

The brazen assault suggests possible coordination between the terror network’s Iraq affiliate and its ideological allies in Syria who are fighting on the side of the rebels against President Bashar Assad’s regime.

The Syrian troops had sought refuge in northern Iraq during recent clashes that ended with the rebels taking over a border crossing along Iraq’s northern province of Ninevah. The troops were being escorted back to Syria through another border crossing, further south, in Iraq’s western Anbar province, when they were ambushed.

In a statement posted on militant websites Monday, the Islamic State of Iraq said its fighters were monitoring the movements of the soldiers as Iraqi authorities worked to transfer them secretly back across the border.

“The lions of the desert and the men of the impossible missions set up traps along the road that leads to the border exits,” said the statement.

The attack started with militants detonating explosive charges on military escort vehicles assigned to protect trucks carrying the Syrian soldiers, the group said.

After that, “the fighters launched an attack from two directions using light and medium range weapons as well as rocket propelled grenades,” said al-Qaida in Iraq. “Within less than half an hour the whole convoy … was annihilated.”

The account of the attack matches descriptions provided to The Associated Press by Iraqi officials in the immediate aftermath of the assault.

Syria’s conflict began with anti-regime protests in March 2011 and later spiraled into civil war. The U.N. says more than 70,000 people have been killed so far.

BEIRUT: Syrian rebels freed 21 U.N. peacekeepers on Saturday after holding them hostage for four days, ending a sudden entanglement with the world body that earned fighters trying to oust President Bashar Assad a flood of negative publicity.

The episode is bound to prompt new questions about U.N. operations in war-torn Syria. The peacekeepers were part of a force that has spent four decades monitoring an Israeli-Syrian cease-fire without incident.

The Filipino peacekeepers crossed from Syria to safety in Jordan on Saturday afternoon, said Mokhtar Lamani, the Damascus representative of the U.N.-Arab League peace envoy to Syria.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed their release, and called on all parties in Syria to respect the peacekeepers’ freedom of movement.

The peacekeepers were seized Wednesday and were held in the village of Jamlah in southwestern Syria, near Jordan and the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

Their captors from the Martyrs of the Yarmouk Brigades initially said they would only release the hostages once Syrian troops withdrew from the area. In the days leading up to the abduction, rebels had overrun several regime checkpoints and apparently feared reprisals.

However, as the abduction made headlines, the rebels eventually dropped their demand and began negotiating a safe passage for the peacekeepers with U.N. officials. On Friday, a U.N. team tried to retrieve the hostages, but aborted the plan because of heavy regime shelling of the area.

On Saturday, another U.N. team headed toward Jamlah to try again, said a rebel spokesman, who spoke via Skype, insisting on anonymity for fear of reprisals.

He said the U.N. team aborted the mission because of fighting in the area, and that the rebels instead escorted the hostages to the Syrian-Jordanian border.

Lamani said the U.N. team was near Jamlah and was waiting for the rebels to hand over the hostages when the rebels changed their minds and instead drove the peacekeepers to the Jordanian border.

“We don’t know why (the rebels changed the plan), and there were lots of talks on this issue,” he said. “We were surprised when we got the news through a TV station that they had reached Jordan.”

Many rebel groups operate independently, despite efforts by the Syrian opposition to unify the fighters under one command. The abduction appeared to have been such a local initiative, and leaders of the political opposition repeatedly urged the Jamlah rebels to free the hostages.

On Friday, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland warned the rebels that holding the peacekeepers “is not good for them, it’s not good for their reputation.”

The peacekeepers are part of a U.N. monitoring mission known as UNDOF. It was set up in 1974, seven years after Israel captured the plateau and a year after it managed to push back Syrian troops trying to recapture the territory in another regional war.

The U.N. monitors have helped enforce a stable truce between Israel and Syria.

But in recent months, Syrian mortar shells overshooting their target have repeatedly hit the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. In Israel’s most direct involvement so far, Israeli warplanes struck inside Syria in January, according to U.S. officials who said the target was a convoy carrying anti-aircraft weapons bound for Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia allied with Assad and Iran.

Israeli officials have expressed concern that the violence might prompt UNDOF to end its mission.

On Friday, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said “the mission in the Golan needs to review its security arrangements and it has been doing that.”

He said the mission has been looking at different scenarios and arrangements on how to operate “in these new rather difficult and challenging circumstances.”

It was the first time that Filipino peacekeepers, of whom 600 are deployed worldwide and 333 in the Golan Heights, have been seized. The incident has prompted President Benigno Aquino III to review the Philippines’ contributions to U.N. peacekeeping operations.

The Syria conflict began two years ago, starting with largely peaceful protests against Assad. A harsh regime crackdown triggered an armed insurgency that has turned into a full-scale civil war.

The U.N. estimates that the conflict has claimed more than 70,000 lives and forced nearly 4 million people from their homes. The fighting has devastated large areas of the country.

In a statement released Wednesday in Geneva, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, says the figure is based on reports from his agency’s field offices in neighboring countries that have provided refuge for Syrians escaping the civil war. With millions more displaced but still inside Syria, Guterres warns the country is “spiraling towards full-scale disaster.”

He says the number of refugees has swelled dramatically since the first of the year, with most Syrians pouring into Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt. Their presence is severely straining the resources of host countries and the entire international donor community.

AMMAN, Jordan: Syria’s president harshly criticized U.S. and British aid to rebels and set harsh terms for talking to his opponents in a newspaper interview published Sunday, as fighting raged across the country.

On the battlefield, rebels made significant gains in the heavily contested northeastern Syrian, capturing a police academy complex west of Aleppo and storming the central prison in the city of Raqqa, as well as a border crossing along Syria’s frontier with Iraq, activists said.

President Bashar Assad took a tough line against his opponents in the interview with London’s Sunday Times, dialing back earlier hints of flexibility about talks.

He said he is ready for dialogue with armed rebels and militants, but only if they surrender their weapons. Recently his foreign minister offered such talks but left the question of laying down arms unanswered. Assad’s regime often refers to rebels as “terrorists.”

“We are ready to negotiate with anyone, including militants who surrender their arms. We are not going to deal with terrorists who are determined to carry weapons, to terrorize people, to kill civilians, to attack public places or private enterprise and to destroy the country,” Assad said. “We fight terrorism.”

Most opposition groups have rejected talks with Assad’s regime, with some demanding that he resign before talks can begin.

Assad said that he would not step down or go into exile. “No patriotic person will think about living outside his country. I am like any other patriotic Syrian,” he said.

The interview was conducted in Damascus last week and was published Sunday, coinciding with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s first foreign tour.

Kerry met with Syrian rebels in Italy Thursday. He has announced a $60 million package of non-lethal U.S. aid to the rebels.

Assad said the “intelligence, communication and financial assistance being provided is very lethal.”

Assad also bitterly criticized Britain. He said instead of pushing for peace talks, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s “naive, confused, unrealistic” government was trying to end a European Union arms embargo so that the rebels can be supplied with weapons.

“We do not expect an arsonist to be a firefighter,” he said, dismissing any notion that Britain could help end the civil war, which has killed more than 70,000 people.

“How can we ask Britain to play a role while it is determined to militarize the problem? How can we expect them to make the violence less while they want to send military supply to the terrorists?” he asked.

On Thursday, British Foreign Secretary William Hague promised to increase support for the Syrian opposition, including equipment supplies and humanitarian assistance.

Assad said Hague was misguided in his offer of assistance to rebels. “The British government wants to send military aid to moderate groups in Syria, knowing all too well that such moderate groups do not exist in Syria,” he said.

“We all know that we are now fighting al-Qaida, or Jabhat al-Nusra, an offshoot of al-Qaida, and other groups of people indoctrinated with extreme ideologies,” he said.

Assad warned that arming the rebels would have grave consequences.

“Syria lies at the fault line geographically, politically, socially and ideologically. So playing with this fault line will have serious repercussions all over the Middle East,” he said.

He vowed to avenge from Israel for an airstrike on a suspected site — which Syria said was a research center — in Damascus last month.

“Retaliation does not mean missile for missile or bullet for bullet,” he said. “Our own way does not have to be announced.”

KUWAIT CITY: U.N. humanitarian officials led by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon are urging for a major boost in relief aid for Syria at an international conference in Kuwait that includes both foes and backers of President Bashar Assad.

Representatives from more than 60 countries gathered on Wednesday to hear U.N. appeals to pledge up to $1.5 billion to help Syrians caught in the civil war and an estimated 700,000 refugees in neighboring countries such as Jordan and Turkey.

U.N. officials say they only have a fraction of the money needed, though international pledges increased shortly before the Kuwait conference. The European Union and the U.S. promised a total nearly $400 million on Tuesday.

Significant pledges from Gulf nations are also expected. The gathering also includes envoys from Russia and Iran, key Assad supporters.