AMMAN - Security forces killed 37 people in Syria on Friday, activists and residents claimed, as the UN Security Council prepared to discuss Damascus later in the day ahead of a possible vote next week on a new Western-Arab draft resolution aimed at halting 10 months of bloodshed.
Russia, which joined China in vetoing a previous Western draft resolution in October and has since promoted its own draft stating that the Western-Arab version was unacceptable.
"Any decision about a future political settlement in Syria must be made during the political process without ... preliminary conditions," Interfax news agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov as saying.
Moscow has vowed to block any text calling for Assad's resignation.
Friday witnessed renewed protests against President Bashar al-Assad in various parts of the country after weekly Muslim prayers.
In Homs residents mourned the killing of 14 members of a family, allegedly by militiamen in one of the worst sectarian attacks on anti Assad revolts.
At least 15 people were killed in Hama on the fourth day of army assault on protesters in some of the rebellious districts of the city, where Assad's father crushed an armed Islamist uprising in 1982, killing several thousand people.
The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported 22 people killed elsewhere in Syria, including 12 when security forces fired on a funeral march in the southern town of Nowa, five in the normally peaceful city of Aleppo, and four in Homs.
Machinegun fire wounded five people in the Qusour district of Homs, one activist reported.
The state news agency SANA said "terrorists" killed a security man in Homs on Friday and a bomb killed a child and wounded several civilians and security personnel in the Damascus district of Midan.
SANA also reported that three civilians and three security men had been wounded in a bomb attack in the northeastern town of Albukamal, while a suicide bomber had wounded two security men at a checkpoint in the northwestern province of Idlib.
In another sign of Assad's isolation, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal has effectively abandoned his headquarters in Damascus, diplomatic and intelligence sources said.
"He's not going back to Syria," a regional intelligence source said of Meshaal, who has long been based in the Syrian capital.
He heads the Palestinian Islamist group which rules Gaza and is an armed offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Analysts say Meshaal was embarrassed by Assad's crackdown, in which more than 5,000 people have been killed, many of them Sunni Muslim sympathisers of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In a report released Friday, the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said an estimated 384 children have been killed since the uprising began in March and a similar number have been jailed.
