The Islamic State group has beheaded the 82-year-old former antiquities director for the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria's antiquities chief and a monitor said.

Photos purporting to show Khaled al-Assaad's body tied to a post in Palmyra were circulated online by IS supporters.

Nine people, including women and children, were killed when a boat smuggling Palestinians from Lebanon's northern port of Tripoli sank in Turkey's territorial waters, one of the survivors said on Wednesday.

The state-run National News Agency said the survivor told his relatives that the boat was carrying 40 Palestinians from Syrian camps, mainly Yarmuk in Damascus, who had taken refuge in Palestinian shantytowns in northern Lebanon.

U.N. humanitarian chief Stephen O'Brien has dampened expectations by Lebanese officials to allow a large number of Syrian refugees to return home and settle in safe zones.

“It is useless to discuss about safe zones in Syria unless there is a clear intention to guarantee the security of those willing to return to these areas,” O'Brien told An Nahar daily in an interview published on Wednesday.

Syria's armed forces on Tuesday wrested back control of a series of key villages near the regime's coastal bastion that had been overrun by a rebel alliance, a monitor said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said government troops backed by militiamen seized four villages and other strategic locations in Sahl al-Ghab, in the central province of Hama.

A pro-Islamic State jihadist video has urged Turks to rise up against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, accusing him of being a traitor who has sided with the United States and Kurdish militants.

The video -- said to have been recorded in the IS-controlled Raqa province of northern Syria -- is one of the clearest such threats yet made by the Islamic State extremists against Turkey.

Five Syrian migrants died early Tuesday when a boat taking them from Turkey to Greece capsized, reports said, with a survivor telling Agence France Presse the victims were trapped in the hull.

Turkey's official Anatolia news agency reported that 24 migrants had been rescued after the fibreglass boat overturned after leaving Turkey's Bodrum peninsula for the Greek Aegean island of Kos. The corpses of five migrants from the boat were found, it added.

The U.N. Security Council has backed a push for Syrian peace talks in a rare show of unity after widespread condemnation of regime air strikes that killed nearly 100 people.

Analysts said the vote was a sign of new resolve to address Syria's conflict, particularly as the threat of the Islamic State group grows, but cautioned that it was only a first step and vast differences between the two sides remained.

Duaa, a 22-year-old Syrian refugee and mother of two, is nervously counting down the hours in the Turkish resort city of Bodrum, hoping this will be the night her family's life will finally take a turn for the better.

She says her husband paid people-smugglers $1,200 (1,000 euros) for each member of the family to squeeze into an inflatable dinghy for the short but perilous passage from the Turkish coast across the Aegean to the Greek island of Kos and -- maybe -- to a new life in the EU.

The United Nations Security Council on Monday backed a new push for peace talks in Syria adopted by Russia and the other 14 member states, despite reservations from Venezuela.

It was the first time in two years that the council agreed on a political statement on Syria, which French Deputy Ambassador Alexis Lamek described as "historic."

The United States on Monday condemned Syrian air strikes on a rebel-held town that left nearly 100 dead, and insisted President Bashar Assad must go.

"Yesterday's air strikes, following its other recent market bombings and attacks on medical facilities, demonstrate the regime's disregard for human life," State Department spokesman John Kirby said.