President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that Turkey's military operation in Syria was against "terror" groups, appearing to row back on his comments saying it was targeting President Bashar Assad.

France and Britain said Tuesday they would soon submit to the U.N. Security Council a resolution that slaps sanctions on Syrian authorities responsible for the use of chemical weapons.

A joint investigation by the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found that several units of the Syrian army had used toxic weapons against three villages in northern Syria in 2014 and 2015.

Britain called on Monday for an immediate ceasefire in Aleppo, saying a humanitarian catastrophe threatened the Syrian city.

Israeli forces killed four gunmen linked to the Islamic State group after they fired on soldiers Sunday, the military said, in the first such attack on the occupied Golan Heights.

Twenty-two pro-Ankara Syrian rebels were hit by an Islamic State (IS) gas attack in northern Syria, the Turkish army said Sunday, the first time Turkey has accused the jihadists of chemical warfare.

Syrian government and Russian warplanes pounded rebel-held parts of northern Syria Wednesday, including battered second city Aleppo, where food aid rations were near-depleted after months of regime siege.

The renewed bombardment killed at least 35 people in Aleppo city in 24 hours, and sparked anger from Washington and the United Nations.

The European Union on Monday placed 17 Syrian ministers plus the central bank governor on a sanctions blacklist targeting the regime of President Bashar Assad over attacks on civilians.

At least seven children and two pregnant women were killed in an air strike on Syria's rebel stronghold province of Idlib on Tuesday, a monitor said.

Syrian freelance journalist Hadi Abdullah on Monday won one of the world's top press awards for reporting from some of the most perilous zones in his country's five-year-old war.

The Russian army on Monday denied any children were present in a school in Syria's Idlib province where 28 people were killed in an October airstrike blamed on Moscow.

Russia has denied having any role in air strikes that the UN children's agency UNICEF said killed 22 students and six teachers at the school in the village of Hass in northwest Syria on October 26.